Squish. Squish. A couple embraces, their fingers carefully caressing two fleshy gashes in the shape of a carved X. Located on their respective torso flanks, these slashes pucker like keloid scars around a wet red opening as if David Cronenberg designed Jesus’s yoni-ish crucifixion wound. Squick. Squick. The couple’s middle two fingers enter each other’s … Continue reading
It’s been a stinking hot ass summer in NYC (as usual) and I live in a fifth-floor Alphabet City walkup. Even with a brand-spanking new air conditioner, it’s stuffy in here! So I escape the heat by schlepping, panting and slicked with sweat, into movie theaters to try to soak up the not-quite-free AC. This … Continue reading
A shakily drawn, Occult-like circle ripped from that possessed videotape in The Ring flashed ominously before transitioning into a montage of country-fried American Gothic scenes: a woman in short overalls walks down a red dirt path, rides in the back of a pickup truck on an empty road, stares into the fluffy blue-clouded sky, and … Continue reading
Long beaded necklaces, faux pearls, brooches, golden baubles, jingle-jangling bracelets, and an assortment of other ornate, tacky costume jewelry tossed in a clicking-clacking heap inside of an unused toilet. That is the sublime image—the pinnacle of the trash aesthetic—that I’ve been unable to get out of my head since attending a screening of Jill Godmilow’s … Continue reading
Little wet gelatinous orbs of yellow egg yolks, slopping over one another on the top of a trash heap, have never looked so erotic as in a memorable montage in Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, dutifully separated from their whites for a healthier breakfast by Kristen Stewart’s reserved, choppy mulleted gym manager Lou for her … Continue reading
“Lypsinka Suffers Nervous Collapse!” So screams the trashy rag headline from the Los Angeles Tribune that spins dizzily into frame at the beginning of Lypsinka: Toxic Femininity, a 43-minute film directed by Chloë Sevigny and currently screening on The New Group Off Stage’s website (until February 16 so watch it fast!). The report of a … Continue reading
If we could exist without shame, fear, or societally imposed standards of good taste and decorum, would we all dance like Emma Stone’s permanently wide-eyed Bella Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos’s ecstatically whimsical and intoxicatingly weird film Poor Things? I would hope so. In a dance sequence that instantly replaced the butt-naked post-homicide romp through Saltburn … Continue reading
Peering through a crack in a heavy door like a little voyeur or the viewer of Degas’s bathers if Edgar did homoeroticism, Barry Keoghan’s laughably Dickensian (or Roald Dahl-ian)-named Oliver Quick watches from behind as the golden-bodied object of his affection/obsession/envy, Jacob Elordi’s Felix Catton, jacks off until completion in an opulent old bathtub, placed … Continue reading
The most shocking part of late French filmmaker Paul Vecchiali’s 1970 giallo The Strangler (L’Étrangleur), newly restored and given its first ever US theatrical release by Altered Innocence, isn’t baby-faced serial killer Émile (Jacques Perrin) pulling an endearingly quaint homemade-looking white knit scarf around the necks of lonely-hearted Parisian women and yanking. It’s his faithful … Continue reading
“Are you Elvis? Are you God?” So asks PJ Harvey on her astonishing new album I Inside the Old Year Dying. The song, titled “Lwonesome Tonight” in reference to Presley’s own “Are you Lonesome Tonight?”, sees Harvey sing from the perspective of the album’s protagonist, a “not-girl” named Ira-Abel, as she calls out to the … Continue reading