A black screen, a void, then the calming sounds of ocean waves. Keith Richards’s guitar punctures the roiling relaxation, as sea-green ocean waves brighten the screen. Merry Clayton woos over the opening riff of The Rolling Stones’ Vietnam-era anthem, “Gimme Shelter,” as a drone shot flits over a sandy beach and a pool deck with … Continue reading
Being buried under precarious, emergency-surgery-threatening heaps and heaps of snow, ice, and slush is the perfect opportunity for obsessive movie-watching. Not schlepping around to galleries, climbing over the road gritty, dog-and-human shit-covered ice mountains that collect at the edge of every sidewalk in New York, to gaze disappointingly at mostly bland art (Not to mention … Continue reading
After seeing Ari Aster’s newest “divisive” ride, Eddington, I returned home and put on Darryl Cooper’s three-hour marathon “Jeffrey Epstein: This was your life!” episode of Tucker Carlson. While I didn’t make it through that long haul in one night, Cooper’s deep dive into Bill Barr’s daddy and Epstein’s first employer after dropping out of … 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
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