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Flat Perseverance is Edged Out by Bleakness in The Dog Stars

About twenty minutes into The Dog Stars , Jacob Elordi’s Hig loses his beloved German Shepherd Jasper. And the movie never recovers. It is called The Dog Stars , based on the book by Peter Heller, and whatever reasoning for that title there actually is (the film never reveals it), one would expect the dog introduced as chief companion to the protagonist would have some major part to play. But even posthumously, Jasper isn’t particularly significant to this apocalypse story about struggling to go on and find reason to live amidst societal collapse. I’m broadly an agnostic where dogs in movies are concerned, but this one is markedly dimmer once the dog exits the picture. Director Ridley Scott however tuckers on just like his lead, yet fails to make the point that character and those who matter to him are meant to. It’s the nearest Scott has come to making a zombie film, and it bears more than a little passing resemblance to 28 Years Later , in both its hordes of nebulously-infected dehu...
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The Debilitating Defensiveness of Finding Emily

The romantic-comedy genre is not what it used to be, for good or bad. Its tropes are extremely understood by now, and it is a genre that seems to turn more people off than any other. I know folks who will watch any kind of movie except a rom-com. And that may be a part of the reason the genre has fallen out of fashion in recent decades. When we do see them, they have to be wrapped in either undeniable movie stars like Anyone But You or conceptual gimmicks like One Night Only or Palm Springs or just be attached to other priorities alongside the romance like Voicemails for Isabelle or The Idea of You . And it also helps if they can work in a number of flashy antics. The filmmakers behind Finding Emily , director Alicia MacDonald and writer Rachel Hirons, by contrast seem to really believe in the sincere rom-com that doesn’t need any of that stuff, and are also perhaps annoyed by what they perceive as a more cynical culture that has wounded it. Specifically it is a movie that points t...
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The Unforgiving, Existential Dread of It Ends

As the credits roll on It Ends , you realize how clever a title that actually is. There is some foreshadowing in it and some reassurance, tied in with both the plot of the movie and the existentialism it evokes. It is a horror film about deeper more uncertain fears than we are used to seeing, at least in this format. It is almost like a film equivalent of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or Sartre’s No Exit -repackaged for a Gen-Z sensibility. And it is uniquely unsettling in that. What conventional modes of horror it does engage with, and only out of some logistical necessity, takes a backseat to the unexplainable psychological torment it subjects its characters to. It is a remarkable debut feature from Alexander Ullom that got a limited VOD release late last year via the Letterboxd Video Store of all things. A perfect choice perhaps, this does feel made for a Letterboxd audience. Fortunately that didn’t preclude a theatrical run, and once its time on Letterboxd was up, Neon managed to ac...
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Coyote vs Acme: Of Course You Realize This Means War

David Zaslav is an idiot. That’s pretty common knowledge at this point but it is good to have such a forceful demonstration of that as Coyote vs. Acme , the movie his regime at Warner Bros. tried to have buried as a tax write-off only for it to eventually be rescued and at long last released -turning its David and Goliath story into a strikingly meta-textual screed on its own gestation and ultimate triumph. Perhaps it’s better the movie isn’t distributed by Warner Bros. -it would be too embarrassing for them to bear. A reason for the lack of confidence in the film, which I don’t know of Zaslav or his board said so directly, is the lack of faith at Warner Bros. in their own cartoon icons. The Looney Tunes are arguably the most vital staple of that studio, mascots nearly as ubiquitous with Warner Bros. as Mickey Mouse and the gang over at Disney. And yet they have not bothered to utilize these characters over the past few decades, risking their evaporation in the cultural lexicon of ...
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Futurama Reviews: S11E05 -"Catfish Hunter"

Well, there’s some unfortunate timing on this episode’s part. Or maybe on my part because Hulu dropped it a few weeks back despite being out of order and I haven’t watched it until now. Either way it’s weird at this moment to be seeing a caricature of Dolly Parton in a Futurama episode. Perhaps that’s not exactly what Idabelle Sue is meant as, but Tress Macneille is very clearly doing a Dolly Parton impression for her generic sultry southerner voice. It’s a connection hard to miss and it is a little distracting -though that is of course not any fault of the episode “Catfish Hunter”, which is rather good otherwise. An episode about scams and catfishing, naturally it is a Bender show. It also naturally begins with unfortunately an instance of elder abuse. Bender takes Fry to visit his Abuelatron (as seen in “The One Amigo” ) who has left Mexico and moved into a nearby retirement home called Rusty Acres where Bender has made a point to see her once a year. Against the snapshot of her dour...
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Back to the Feature: Summer of '42 (1971)

I and other critics like to bemoan movies that operate on pure nostalgia. But I get it, the comfort of the past is so alluring that it is easy to want to escape into -hence why it feels like such a lazy device in movies. The 2020s are awash in nostalgia in a cynical effort to cash in on fond memories and youthful feelings, and while it’s never been as prolific a characteristic it is not without some precedent. Previous decades and other generations had their own nostalgia-bait though it took on different forms and wasn’t entirely tied to pop culture. Still, it was driven by that same sensation. In the 1970s, perhaps the best nostalgia picture was George Lucas’s American Graffiti with its image of carefree California youths in the early 1960s pre-Vietnam. But an equally popular one was Summer of ‘42 . Summer of ‘42 is an interesting nostalgia film though because its nostalgia is melancholy in nature. It is reflective of a period of youth marked by innocence but also the loss of it, fe...
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A Breezy, Engaging Tony Encapsulates a Summer of Self-Discovery

       “I was -to be frank- a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” Not a lot of biopics will open on a quote like this from their subject -usually their goal is to celebrate said subject and not emphasize the flaws in their character so starkly. But Anthony Bourdain was nothing if not frank, one gets the sense he would not want to be misrepresented as some two-dimensional genius chef who made the world a better place. That quote sets the tone for Tony , which limits its scope to merely Bourdain’s second summer during college -not exactly a period of high esteem for most of us, let alone an insecure kid with a big ego who is a pathological liar. That is the image that this movie presents of Bourdain and it is incredibly compelling for that. The film is directed by burgeoning Canadian treasure Matt Johnson -his first American movie and first real test of his abilities in the Hollywood ...
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