Review| Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri & the Backroads to Justice
Three monuments stand erect in a staggered row along a road that gets little traffic in the town of Ebbing, Missouri; justice, here, like any other place is relegated to the backroads of peoples’ consciousness and not its central thoroughfares.…
Oh! The Horror… | of the People Around Us
David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) still stands as an example of cinema that succeeds at balancing the visceral thrills and exploitation of true crime narratives with a sensitivity towards those victims, investigators, and involved bystanders who actually lived in the Zodiac’s…
Oh! The Horror… | of the Last Church on the Left
The tension between the sadistic and masochistic appeals of horror was reflected in the divide between Cunningham and Craven. The producer saw LAST HOUSE as an escape, an outlet for some dormant pain. As it happens, he also knew that…
Oh! The Horror… | of the First Day of the Rest of Your Life
“There is no way that this winter is *ever* going to end as long as this groundhog keeps seeing his shadow. I don’t see any other way out. He’s got to be stopped. And I have to stop him.” –…
Review| Marshall
A couple of months ago, my review of Detroit opined the failure to keep the eyes of the audience on the black narrative and, instead, found it’s gaze concentrated on the white Detroit police officers at the center of the film’s…
Oh! The Horror… | of the Liturgy of Michael Myers
Breathe in, breathe out. Stand up, sit down, kneel. Morning prayer, confession, remission. Leer, stalk, kill. Going through the process of (finally) viewing all of the Halloween franchise, in order, has been an odd endeavor. Some assumptions have been verified…
A Review of mother!, or How I Learned to Stop Being Dubious and Write Something about This Film
“Whatever exists, [the judge] said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” – Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West “There’s imagery there. The religious text is great mythology. Out of that…
Oh! The Horror… | of IT (2017)
My personal history with the image of, specifically, Tim Curry’s 1990 incarnation of Pennywise the Clown is mired in chronological uncertainty and revisionist history. I don’t remember when I first came in contact with film, let alone the clown. When…
Oh! The Horror… | of Anthologies
There is something deeply satisfying about how peoples’ stories intersect and collide in the strangest ways. One of my good friends was recounting how he had gone to see the metal band, The Sword, in Fort Worth at Lola’s. As…
When the Center Does Not Hold: The Problem with Detroit
“The white gaze: it traps black people in white imaginations. It is the eyes of a white schoolteacher who sees a black student and lowers expectations. It is the eyes of a white cop who sees a black person and…