Thoughts

More complexly put, it delicately walks the tightrope of being commentary on our sociopolitical landscape and simultaneously being a laugh-out-loud satirical comedy. Oh, and it’s an action film. PTA pulled out all the stops for this one, not only assembling an ensemble cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio Del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Sean Penn, and newcomer Chase Infiniti...

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.

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.

The story follows Luke Wilson as a quite literal average Joe who gets roped into an army science experiment to be frozen, which, of course, goes wrong. He wakes up five hundred years later, as everyone has become insanely dumb through generations of inbreeding and bad traits passing down, he is the smartest man in the world.

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.

Requiem for a Dream earns every ounce of respect and infamy it has earned over the years. This is not for the faint of heart whatsoever. The story follows an interconnected group of diverse characters in the slums of New York City in the 90s as they struggle through progressively worse addiction. Jared Leto leads the cast as a young son and boyfriend who comes across a “great idea” to start slinging the drugs he and his friends are so hopelessly addicted to.

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.

I started with the brand-new release on MAX that is Companion (2025), starring Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid in the lead roles. This is a black comedy, horror, thriller film that delves into the world of artificial intelligence and how our relationship with it is likely to evolve.

Breaking Hollywood news! And some fantastic news as such! Variety has confirmed over the past few days that...

As far as my movie-watching goes, I started the week with a rewatch of one of my all-time favorite films, Quentin Tarantino's...