“The perfect movie for a country sickened by plague and politics, it finds our disgraced reporter stumbling undercover around CPAC, synagogues and anti-mask rallies. Unspeakably gross and containing something sure to offend just about everybody, it’s also sort of sweet. Schmaltzy, even. Or at least as schmaltzy as a Baron Cohen movie can be.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/21/2020
“What’s endlessly confirmed is that he was a hilarious cheapskate, charging friends to use the telephone at his home and taking care to save not just the buttons from his old, discarded shirts but also the rubber bands wrapped around his morning newspapers. With two Rolls-Royces stashed in separate cities, Cary Grant still clipped coupons.” – North Shore Movies, 10/20/2020
“It’s a story perfectly suited for Sorkin, a screenwriter who specializes in soaring, self-righteous speeches by quippy idealists who love being smarter than you. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is his best script since The Social Network, chockablock with hyperliterate zingers and groovy grandstanding. Nobody really talks this way but we all wish we did.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/15/2020
“Shot in secret over the past few months, it’s a sober, step-by-step recounting of the Trump administration’s catastrophically bungled response to COVID-19. There are no big revelations here, the movie’s mostly stuff we already knew. Yet seeing it all laid out end-to-end like this made me so furious I had to go walk it off for a little while.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/14/2020
“Writer-director Quirke clearly saw Black Swan and liked it an awful lot, but I’m starting to think that filmmakers should have to apply for a license before being allowed to shoot in ‘scope. Maybe require them to turn in two or three storyboards showing how they plan to utilize the widescreen frame for something more than just TV that’s squinting.” – North Shore Movies, 10/13/2020
My sixth and final dispatch from the 58th New York Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Steve McQueen’s Red, White And Blue, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning, Gianfranco Rosi’s Notturno, Azazel Jacobs’ French Exit and Spike Lee’s film of David Byrne’s American Utopia.
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Thrilled to join Travis Woods on his podcast breaking down Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. We discuss “the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable” and how the movie has more in common with Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas than just an attorney played by Benicio Del Toro. – Increment Vice, 10/09/2020
“Genial fuckarounds for the genuinely gifted Sandler and his moderately talented posse, these Happy Madison films felt so insulting when you had to make the actual effort to drive somewhere and hand over your hard-earned money to see them, but now that they just pop up unsolicited on Netflix I suppose there are worse ways to kill a couple of hours.” – North Shore Movies, 10/07/2020
“Director Garrett Bradley does something fascinating with all this home video footage. Instead of presenting a straight chronology or clearly delineated flashbacks, she and editor Gabriel Rhodes have collapsed past and present into one big continuous reverie, allowing snippets of scenes old and new to soar away on a gorgeous solo piano score.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/07/2020
“For more than two decades the Boston Underground Film Festival fest has been screening the wildest, weirdest and most outré offerings for area audiences in a self-described ‘annual sensory bacchanalia from beyond the mainstream.’ Better late than never, this year’s celebration is finally happening with a little help from their friends.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/07/2020
SPLICED PERSONALITY 