Thoughts

The performances by Denzel Washington and Jeffrey Wright steal the show. Fantastic comedic and tense moments are offset by a majority of cringeworthy dialogue and the most awkward scoring choices I’ve ever heard. It felt like watching a soap opera at more than a handful of moments. Going off of that, the police dialogue had to be some of the worst I’ve ever seen. The redeeming moments are within the tense action scenes, led by the direction of Lee with Denzel on the move.

I have seen almost all of the Coen Brothers’ films, but Barton Fink (1991) continued to slip under the radar. And how? This is easily their most creative and inventive story! It follows John Turturro as the titular character, a neurotic young man who writes plays for the theater in the 1920s.

In Eddington, Mr. Aster takes the thrilling components of his horror efforts and reshapes them into a contemporary Western black comedy. A wild departure thematically from his other work, but it utilizes a lot of the tropes that he’s become famous for. The story surrounds the small town of Eddington, New Mexico, where a liberal mayor and a conservative sheriff go toe-to-toe over the political strife of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The story has been adapted to the screen at least twice, most famously by Spielberg in 2005. This time, they took the overdone “everything is on the computer screen” approach and stuck Ice Cube front and center to put on a show. But he does anything other than put on a show, he practically sounds like he's reading the script for the very first time with his finger dragging across the lines as he reads.

Since Whiplash (2014), Damien Chazelle has been at the top of my list when it comes to watching new releases. So, when it came out that he was making a three-hour epic about the pre-sound era of Hollywood, I was more than sold on the experience. That was until I actually got around to watching it and got to that fateful opening scene with the elephant. If you haven’t seen the film, I won’t spoil it here, but just know there is fecal matter involved.

All this to say, I did start the week off strong with a viewing of each of Gregg Araki’s entries in his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy from the mid-to-late 90s. The trilogy includes Totally F***ed Up (1993), The Doom Generation(1995), and the conclusion to the saga, Nowhere (1997). The films are loosely connected by themes of queer alienation, rage against the establishment, and an inherent nihilistic perspective on life and the future.

Hazy recollection of the recent week’s days. It was a full and long week of work, and I was really feeling the monotony this time around. You know you’re cooked when you show up to work and immediately start creating checkpoints for yourself. “Okay, we just gotta make it to nine o'clock”… Then, “Now, ten”…

The story follows Kyle MacLachlan as a young man back from school in his small, idyllic American suburb when he stumbles across a severed human ear in a field. After taking it into the local police station, his curiosity gets the better of him as he sets off into the secret underworld of a town once thought to be innocent.

With themes reminiscent of Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000), this film takes a comic approach to the horrors of drug abuse and addiction. It follows four friends united by opium addiction and a life of robbery and crime overall to sustain the habit. Ewan McGregor leads the cast as Renton, a soul grappling with the harsh realities of his present and (lack of) future as he fights to find a way out of the vicious cycle.

The film follows Jordan, portraying twin brothers, gangsters who have been holding out in Chicago, and are now returning home to the South to open a juke joint. The story takes its time getting us acquainted with not only the twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, but their friends and family who unite under the roof of their new bar for the turning point of the film, when the vampires come out…

Nathan goes above and beyond this season in analyzing the issues behind cockpit communication between pilots and their first officers. He opens the season incredibly honestly, not making jokes or trying even to make something overtly funny at all, instead, establishing the key problems he has been studying from plane crashes around the world.

This one I hold close to my heart just due to the immense weight of its emotion and how it digs its claws into your soul and carefully dissects it by the time the credits are rolling. The story follows Charlie, a young high schooler who doesn’t have any friends and is simultaneously dealing with some harsh personal trauma. What strikes me about this film is the direction by Chbosky, who clearly had a vision for this novel coming to life prior to his making it.

This is Spike Lee at the absolute top of his game, weaving cinematic spectacle with hard-hitting rhetorical questions about the consequences of America’s greatest sin. The opening scenes are almost a celebration of many films before it, before quickly devolving into the horrors Malcolm would experience, leading to the tumultuous and eventually life-taking journey of religious and spiritual, and moreover, societal acceptance.

Todd Solondz will always have a special place in my heart. He is, to me, what John Waters was and is to many to this day.

“…Because I’m champagne, and you’re shit. Until the day you die.” One of the final lines uttered by Jon Lovitz’s character...

Every once in a while, an "epic" will stand out among the rest and cement itself as a truly great piece of art.