“Help! There’s a pervert after me!” A gorgeous woman (or so we assume) with petite features, framed by her pencil-thin eyebrows and gigantic 1970s bug sunglasses, dashes up to a man with mussed hair and a blue and red striped shirt, rudely interrupting his shouty breakup phone call with a soon-to-be ex: “Only losers get … Continue reading
You must understand two things to appreciate the overblown, overindulgent glory of Francis Ford Coppola’s crackpot masterpiece Megalopolis. First, the most pie-in-the-sky fantastical architecture that Coppola can muster is apparently a waving, gelatinous, see-through, glimmering moving walkway as if Hudson Yards’ suicide shawarma, The Vessel, traded its now-fenced-in staircases for technology largely found between far-flung … Continue reading
“What has been used on one side is lost on the other side. There’s no going back,” lectures a stern voice at the other end of the telephone after Demi Moore’s frantic has-been actress turned Suzanne Somers’-like exercise guru Elisabeth Sparkle calls customer service to whine about a hitch in her new, ill-advised foray into … Continue reading
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
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
Laced with easy ironies, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest forgoes subtlety in its rendering of the mundane monstrosities of Nazi concentration camp administrators through one distinctly complacent family. Aided by the minimalism of Mica Levi’s shrieking and belching score, cottagecore bliss is juxtaposed against an aural backdrop of carnage where occasional gunshots and screams … 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