This is not a film about the inspirational / emancipatory nature of pop culture's fascination with superheroes, or one that argues for the contemporary power of pop-mythology. Glass suggests that the contemporary neoliberal project, as it currently stands, exhibits a desire to push the idea of exceptionality (in this case, people w/ power over "the system") into the realm of the fantastical; a possibility that only exists in the pages of an alternate, more heightened, reality. Any belief deemed to…
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllPinned reviews
More-
-
House of 1000 Corpses 2003
Rob Zombie's filmography seems to be one of the few contemporary examples of a filmmaker who intentionally “involves the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment of the past” in their work. This isn't to suggest that Zombie's works are “speaking” to the totality more truthfully than the most canonical horror films of its era. In fact, it's important to sidestep the idea of reflectionism completely; it is a concept that has been…
Recent reviews
More-
Midnight Cowboy 1969
The subtle things Voight does to go from looking like a John Wayne-style piece of Western iconography to a little boy in a costume is pretty remarkable, especially for a breakout role; the American dream is dead and who better to bear witness than its progenitor 🤠 🐮
-
Fright Night Part 2 1988
Saw a beat-up 35mm print of this in Toronto, so the environment may have helped this thing along, but it rocked man, wow. Completely dialed-in comedy which played perfectly in a sold out screening, notably sophisticated montage especially in its opening act, totemic atmosphere via beautifully expressive lighting, pulsating synth score. Genuinely stunning; a memory I’ll never forget.
Popular reviews
More-
House of 1000 Corpses 2003
Obsessed with Zombie’s aesthetic, how his editing style (cutting between film, handheld digital home-video style imagery and Friday-night TV-special graphics) formalizes the film’s thematic interests. The most extreme perversions commodified as American iconography; serial killers become myth, canonized and celebrated... and true evil can silently hide amongst the condescending revelry. I don’t think Zombie implies any causality but he certainly toys with corollary structures between voyeur and object, and its use of direct influence/weaponized pastiche makes for an incredibly rich text on horror spectatorship. It’s (probably) the best film to come out of the Y2K post-Scream "post-modern" American horror era.
-
House of 1000 Corpses 2003
Still incredible. Zombie makes his deep movie dork obsessions very obvious in all of his films, but I grow more and more impressed with his ability to ooze passion and love for the medium while simultaneously interrogating his fandom as well as the utility and complicity of cinematic modes and genres and its implicit links to the American psyche. A perfect 9/11 era companion to 31, his Trump era masterpiece in which he concretes his incredibly tortured and conflicted treatise on the…