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HTTP/2 200 date: Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:41:46 GMT content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 server: cloudflare vary: Accept-Encoding link: ; rel="https://api.w.org/" expires: Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:41:46 GMT cache-control: max-age=0 x-cache-status: HIT x-rocket-nginx-serving-static: MISS strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block x-content-type-options: nosniff x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN referrer-policy: no-referrer-when-downgrade content-security-policy: default-src * 'unsafe-inline' 'unsafe-eval' data: blob:; report-to: {"group":"cf-nel","max_age":604800,"endpoints":[{"url":"https://a.nel.cloudflare.com/report/v4?s=gP01vYljyIIoyF9rz%2BZnE1VDPRKqotTvOZXUtJsTwNvvy8Q%2Btz6189l7gkBEw7bfG7aDjhHEFTUE1mSNq%2F1CG%2FSWmWh68jcJAKBDbuHO"}]} nel: {"report_to":"cf-nel","success_fraction":0.0,"max_age":604800} cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC content-encoding: gzip cf-ray: 9c59d5ed68c63c64-BOM alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400 The Life and Art of vern

Worm on a Hook

(read the rest of this shit…)

October 5th, 2020 | 120 Comments »

F1

F1 (advertised as F1® THE MOVIE) is a slick, well made, big budget car racing/Brad Pitt movie. Nothing more or less, really. It’s from Joseph Kosinski, director of TOP GUN: MAVERICK, and continues in the exploration of a stubborn, aging hot shot butting heads with, teaching, and then passing the torch to a younger generation, and it shoots race cars similar to how that movie shot fighter jets. You’re clearly looking at the actors inside actual fast moving cars, not just green screen, and that goes a long way. Of course, flying was more exciting.

Brad Pitt (CUTTING CLASS) plays Sonny Hayes, legendary bad boy racer who had a terrible crash in the ‘90s (when he had long blond hair) followed by a stint as a professional gambler and cab driver before his surprising comeback. In the opening scene he helps his old buddy Chip (Shea Whigham, NON-STOP) and his team win in Daytona, then leaves without taking the trophy. I think he’s living in a van when another old friend, Rubén Cervantes (Javier Bardem, PERDITA DURANGO) tracks him down at the laundromat and asks for help with his racing team.

Rubén used to race against Sonny, now he wears incredible suits and owns the APXGP Formula One team, who are in last place and in danger of being sold by the board if they don’t win a Grand Prix. Of course Sonny refuses the call, then changes his mind and struts onto the track looking like the coolest dude anybody there ever saw. But they’re mostly not impressed. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 27th, 2026 | 10 Comments »

Train Dreams

TRAIN DREAMS is the chillest and maybe artiest of this year’s best picture nominees. It was also nominated for best adapted screenplay (from the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson), best cinematography (Adolpho Veloso) and best original song (Nick Cave). If you never heard of it, it’s because it’s only on Netflix, and because it’s a peaceful, contemplative movie about the unremarkable life of a logger in Idaho. There’s a bit of THE TREE OF LIFE in it, but it’s not as slow or humorless as that might sound. I liked it in more than a “pretty good for homework” type of way.

It tells the story of Robert Grainier (the Master Gardener himself Joel Edgerton), who grows up an orphan in and around Bonners Ferry, Idaho, and doesn’t have much passion for anything until he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones, THE TEMPEST). They get married, buy an acre of land next to a river, build a cabin, have a daughter. He gets some work helping build a bridge for the Spokane International Railway but has a bad experience, then spends most of his life doing seasonal logging work, away from where he wants to be, and worrying he’s cursed. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 26th, 2026 | 7 Comments »

The Rip

THE RIP is Netflix’s new Gritty Cop Thriller (G.C.T.) written and directed by Joe Carnahan (THE A-TEAM, THE GREY, BOSS LEVEL), sharing story credit with Michael McGrale (additional literary material, THE EXPENDABLES 4). It’s a pretty good movie if you enjoy Carnahan’s more serious minded work and/or if you’re interested in the gimmick of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon reuniting as best buddies but in a movie where they’re Gritty Cops so they’re each afraid the other is corrupt and is gonna stab them in the back. There is friendship but also yelling, guns, etc.

It all starts with the prologue death of Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco, LONDON) of the Miami-Dade PD. She seems to be Onto Something Big when she gets ambushed by masked men. It’s a good shoot out scene, of the post-HEAT loud and quasi-realistic variety. I like the detail that she’s having trouble calling for help because she got some of her blood on her phone screen. This is the incident that sends FBI agents played by Scott Adkins (X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE) and Daisuke Tsuji (Ghost of Tsushima video game) in to question the members of Jackie’s elite Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT), suggesting they might have been involved. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 22nd, 2026 | 10 Comments »

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

I liked 28 DAYS LATER when it came out in 2003 and I liked 28 WEEKS LATER when it came out in 2007, but I still have never revisited them. So I’m honestly very surprised how invested I am in this followup trilogy that started last year with Danny Boyle’s 28 YEARS LATER and now continues with Nia DaCosta’s 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE.

It was such a surprising choice: Boyle and writer Alex Garland finally made their long anticipated third film, but also prepared a script for the director of LITTLE WOODS and CANDYMAN 2021 to shoot back-to-back with it. Boyle’s movie set up the new characters, and now DaCosta continues their story, but other than a few homages during zombie attacks she doesn’t mimic Boyle’s style at all. Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES, WIDOWS, THE RHYTHM SECTION), editor Jake Roberts (HELL OR HIGH WATER, MEN) and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir (JOKER, TÁR) all go in very different directions from the distinct ones Boyle’s team chose, giving us a calmer and more traditional (not shot on iPhones) but still very effective look at this world of a zombie infection pandemic and its survivors. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 21st, 2026 | 11 Comments »

Marshmallow

MARSHMALLOW (2025) is a well made summer camp horror movie that manages the impressive feat of not really seeming like a riff on FRIDAY THE 13TH, SLEEPAWAY CAMP or THE BURNING (or for that matter CHEERLEADER CAMP, MADMAN, STAGE FRIGHT, CUB, or HELL OF A SUMMER). It does this in part by taking the kids, the parents and (to a lesser extent) the counselors seriously as characters and giving them relatable emotions before most of the horror movie stuff kicks in.

Morgan (Kue Lawrence, DEATHCEMBER, SKETCH) is a shy kid cursed with a horrendous bowl cut. In the opening scene he timidly approaches some taller kids who are aggressively passing a basketball around and asks if he can join them. They pretty much tell him to eat shit and run away while laughing at him. Morgan doesn’t notice this, but his grandpa (Corbin Bernsen, THE DENTIST) is sitting across the street witnessing the whole thing. So we feel both the pain of the kid and of the adult who’s gotta be torn up about what he’s seeing but can’t really intervene without humiliating the kid further. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 20th, 2026 | 2 Comments »

Bugonia

BUGONIA is the 2025 movie from director Yorgos Lanthimos, who just did POOR THINGS in 2023 and then KINDS OF KINDNESS in 2024. I can’t even keep up with the guy! This one’s a little different because it’s a remake of the 2003 South Korean film SAVE THE GREEN PLANET!. By all accounts it’s great, but I still haven’t seen it, so calculate that in if you’re trying to figure out how much you’ll like this.

I assumed it was a situation like Spike Lee’s OLDBOY where producers were trying to do the English language version for some reason and found an auteur to do it, but it turns out this would’ve been original director Jang Joon-hwan remaking his own movie if he hadn’t gotten sick and handed the reins (and the script by Will Tracy [THE MENU, former editor in chief of The Onion]) over to Lanthimos. Jang is still an executive producer, along with Ari Aster and others.

Nevertheless it feels very Lanthimos, and reunites him with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, plus his team of cinematographer Robbie Ryan, editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis, composer Jerskin Fendrix and production designer James Price. I wouldn’t consider it a work-for-hire. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 19th, 2026 | 5 Comments »

Nature Calls

Last month I got interested in the indie writer/director Todd Rohal, and reviewed three of his movies: THE GUATEMALAN HANDSHAKE, THE CATECHISM CATACLYSM, and of course his latest, FUCK MY SON!. Now I watched another one.

Of the Rohal joints I’ve seen so far, NATURE CALLS (2012) is the closest to a normal, mainstream comedy. It stars well known comedians/funny actors, it’s full of many broad, silly jokes, its third act shift into craziness overdrive is tame compared to Rohal’s other films. But not in a bad way. It’s a very funny movie with plenty of the director’s personality evident, which is kind of a relief because jesus christ man look at this DVD cover:

I don’t think Rohal is trying to be subversive with this one, but it kinda does the trick just by looking like disposable crap but having some bluntly accurate social satire and a strange tone that’s pretty much a family movie but with death and boobs and cursing. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 15th, 2026 | 1 Comment »

It Was Just an Accident

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT is last year’s Palme d’Or winning film by Iranian writer/director Jafar Panahi (THE WHITE BALLOON, OFFSIDE). It’s a wrenching drama about ordinary people who were once political prisoners and suddenly stumble across a chance for some payback.

It does start with an accident, when a man (Ebrahim Azizi) driving with his wife (Afssaneh Najmabadi) and kid (Delnaz Najafi) at night hits one of the many stray dogs that roam the streets, damaging his car. He stops at a garage where one of the mechanics, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri, NO BEARS), perks up at the sound of his squeaking prosthetic leg. He clearly recognizes him.

The next day Vahid follows the guy. Watches him. It’s very tense. He’s circling around in his car. He has a shovel. He hits him with it. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 14th, 2026 | 2 Comments »

Chain Reactions

I think I mentioned this once a long time ago, but Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is one of my favorite movies, and one of the great cinematic obsessions of my life. So I’m happy to say that the recent documentary about the movie, CHAIN REACTIONS, is a good one.

It’s not about the making of the movie. For that I recommend Brad Shellady’s THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: A FAMILY PORTRAIT (1988), which is an oral history through interviews with the actors who played the family members. This one is more of a video essay, speaking to five people who had nothing to do with the movie – a comedian, two filmmakers, a critic and a novelist. (Specifically it’s Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King and Karyn Kusama.) I think they have some good insights, but what made this really work for me is the specific ways director Alexandre O. Philippe (MEMORY: THE ORIGINS OF ALIEN, LYNCH/OZ) visually weaves together the interviews with different experiences of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and horror films as a whole, while avoiding pretty much all of the annoying cliches of modern fan documentaries. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 13th, 2026 | 2 Comments »

Fremont

FREMONT (2023) is an odd, dry little indie film I came across. I guess if forced I’d have to classify it as a drama, just so nobody gets mad at me for it not being a laugh riot. But it’s not really heavy, kind of a strange undertone of sad and funny, which is why I liked it.

Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is an Afghan refugee in Fremont, California. She lives in the same building as some other Afghans, including one (Timur Nusratty) who won’t even acknowledge her. She says it’s because she “worked with the enemy” by being a translator for the U.S. Army. She did that for a visa, for a chance to get the fuck out of there, to get anywhere else. Not necessarily here.

She commutes to San Francisco to work at a small fortune cookie factory. “I thought it would be lovely to see Chinese people sometimes,” she explains. The process of how the cookies are made is also a pretty lovely thing to see in a movie. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 12th, 2026 | 3 Comments »

Hey bud, thanks for reading.
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Recent commentary and jibber-jabber
- Skani on F1: “I think, if you enjoyed TOP GUN 2, it’s a good bet you’ll enjoy this one, and the inverse. Like…” Jan 28, 20:33
- Acid Burn on F1: “Ever since I started to pay attention to him in HBO’s Perry Mason, I’ve really enjoyed it whenever Shea Whigham…” Jan 28, 16:47
- burningambulance on F1: “My dad was an F1 fan (surprising for an American, I know) so I would occasionally see him watching these…” Jan 28, 14:05
- A.L.F. on The Smashing Machine (2025): “I do feel it deserves to be said that I was correct about these people – that it is now…” Jan 28, 13:31
- Crudnasty on F1: “I had a dad, I am a dad, and this movie just looked like “Toxic Masculinity and Gross Rich People…” Jan 28, 13:12
- Mr. Majestyk on F1: “I think you need have grown up with a dad to want to see this movie. My dadichlorian count is…” Jan 28, 09:07
- BuzzFeedAldrin on F1: “I felt this was sort of the opposite of The Smashing Machine which I also saw recently, but both left…” Jan 28, 08:41
- Bill Reed on F1: “I really enjoyed this one. Sturdy chassis, well-oiled, fine-tuned, aerodynamic, good around the corners, etc. Yeah, it’s about an old…” Jan 28, 08:12
- Skani on F1: “Hard for me to take the Oscars seriously as anything other than a highly skewed, highly I political (in every…” Jan 28, 07:58
- Numpty on 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple: “Liked it okay, not as much as the last one, rolled my eyes at a few bits, but the shaky-cam…” Jan 28, 06:31
- Edgard on F1: “I regret that i did not see this one in theater as it was made for that experience… I am…” Jan 28, 04:31
- Mike on F1: “As an F1 and film fan, I liked it. The other drivers, cars and even commentators are all the genuine…” Jan 27, 09:15
- Llamakazi on The Killer (2023): “The Killer also gets caught on camera on the way up the elevator to the billionaire’s home. Since the heat…” Jan 27, 00:30
- Alex R on Train Dreams: “Sanding off Robert’s edges seems as much a symptom of being afraid to fully grapple with Denis Johnson’s tone as…” Jan 26, 16:35
- Matt on Train Dreams: “Alex R – I really don’t understand the revenge killing, I suppose. I’m not sure what it was trying to…” Jan 26, 15:55
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