Let’s Talk About: Under the Silver Lake

It’s a sad indictment of the collective temperament of the human race that those in the public eye are often remembered best not for their triumphs and achievements, but for their blunders and missteps. Where directors and writers are concerned, oftentimes the most calamitous of these blunders and missteps have directly followed the greatest of their triumphs or achievements. Michael Cimino won Best Director in 1979 for The Deer Hunter, which he immediately followed up with 1980’s Heaven’s Gate, a disasterpiece that by all accounts ruined the industry for everybody. Kevin Smith defined slacker culture with Clerks in 1994, which he has since been following up with everything else in the View Askewniverse, which is apparently a thing that people take seriously. Robert David Mitchell was lauded in 2015 for his Indie horror flick slash cautionary tale about sexually transmitted diseases It Follows, and has now followed it up with Under the Silver Lake, a movie that admittedly might have been good had a modicum of restraint been exercised at any point in the editing process.

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Let’s Talk About: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

It seems that everyone is obsessed with Don Quixote these days – Terry Gilliam, Jonathan Pryce, Adam Driver, Alonso Quixano… everyone except the general public.

For you readers whose literary interests stopped developing with Green Eggs and Ham, Don Quixote is a Spanish novel from the 1600s by someone named Miguel de Cervantes. Is it approximately 9,000 pages long and is about a delusional old man who, having come to believe that he is a chivalrous knight of antiquity, embarks on numerous romantic sallies to right wrongs and rescue pretty damsels from conspicuously windmill-shaped giants. The humour of the novel (which I admittedly got fifty pages into, felt I had the gist of it, and stopped reading) stems from the aging Alonso Quixano’s false perceptions of the world around him and his obliviousness to that fact that everyone is actually laughing at his genuine but blundering attempts at heroism.

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Let’s Talk About: The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot (Slightly Abridged)

EDITOR’S NOTE: In the spirit of writing significantly shorter pieces (i.e., not fourteen pages long) I would like to kick off a new phase of Snooty Film Critiques with a revision of my piece on The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot… now slightly abridged.

When the title of your movie is a whopping eleven-syllable salute to exhibitionism like ‘The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot,’ I would argue that it’s not unreasonable to expect it to feature Bigfoot prominently, or even occasionally. Curiously, this debut feature for writer/director Robert D. Krzykowski – which premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montréal last July – has surprisingly little to do with Bigfoot. Or anything at all, for that matter.

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2018 Top Ten List

2018 started with such promise, but much like that one Thanksgiving where I attempted to make beef wellington for my loved ones, it ended with decimated expectations, disillusionment in the promise of good things, and a round of pumped stomachs. Though a few worthwhile releases certainly caught me by surprise, by and large this was a tedious and mediocre year marked by bitter disappointments, even where my beloved Indie market was concerned. Many of the films I had high hopes for fell flatter than grandma after that aforementioned Thanksgiving dinner, while other movies I had no expectations for whatsoever taught me to never again ask “How bad could it possibly be?” unless I’m planning on French kissing a pencil sharpener.

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Overlord: Zombie Cinema at its Finest

Ahh, the holidays. A season of shared mirth, mutual generosity, brazen consumption, and the intentional counting of one’s blessings. For those who perhaps did not have a particularly #blessed year, the latter can be an especially difficult practice. When I personally looked back on 2018, I was dismayed to see that it was mostly full of anguish and misery… theatrically, I mean. Overall my life was quite nice, because I’m a product of middle-class white privilege that I refuse to check because I have no idea what the hell that means. Anyway, there were some horrible, painful, excruciating, nauseating, and outright boring movies this year – the sort that I love to express my loathing for publicly because it gives me a fleeting shot of self-worth. However, in the spirit of the holidays, I’m now going to talk about a recent film I actually loved, and not just because nobody seems to have heard of it and it’s barely surpassing its production budget…

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Biographical Double-Whammy: Bohemian Rhapsody & The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

I’ll make this quick.

I saw Bohemiam Rhapsody this month and was pleasantly surprised to find that, contrary to those early scathing reviews, it was just bland and unremarkable, making it one of the best films I’ve seen all year by default. Critical reaction towards the Freddie Mercury biopic has been polarizing since its wide release, with some lauding it as a pitch-perfect representation of Mercury’s life and others decrying it as disrespectful to the point of homophobia. As with The Last Jedi, I find myself balanced in the middle of the critical teeter-totter, not hating it, not loving it, but also not remembering most of it despite having seen it last week. Then again, I can’t really recall what I had for breakfast on any given day, due to the inordinate number of head injuries I’ve had in my life.

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Effective Protagonists, Part V: The Indiana Jones Series

Now that we’ve identified five different Character elements across a few different titles – Relatability in Star Wars, Driving Need (and Introductions) in Curse of the Black Pearl, Vulnerability and Stakes in Die Hard, and Change across The Terminator films – it should be obvious that few protagonists, even the most effective ones, embody every element simultaneously.

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My Day at the Theater with Venom (Wasted): An Afternoon Memoir

It’s Saturday afternoon in my rural, central-Albertan hometown — Thanksgiving weekend, 2018, to be precise. Autumn is in full swing. The foliage has transitioned to a dazzling array of orange and yellow hues, the fires that had been ignited in the preceding week by up-and-coming arsonists have finally been quelled, and our local millennial population is collectively intaking a potent narcotic compound known as ‘pumpkin spice’ through every orifice in their bodies. How does one spend such a picturesque afternoon, you ask?

Why, at our Theatrical Symposium for Degenerate Fancies, of course!

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Mandy: A Psychadelic Descent into Hell

When I was in college I saw Blade Runner for the first time. I didn’t love it, but I pretended I did in an effort to impress my fellow freshmen with my supposed intellectual prowess. Thus began my Communications and Media major and my ardent exploration of films, which soon whisked me into the wondrous worlds of David Fincher, Ridley Scott, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alfonso Cuarón, David Cronenberg, and Stanley Kubrick. In those days my primary interest was in seeking out films with aesthetic merit in order to analyze them thematically, decipher their symbolism, and interpret universal meaning.

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Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom – Putting the ‘Stink’ in Extinction Event

Imagine, if you will (in your best Rod Sterling voice), a precocious four-year-old boy with a wooden crate brimming with toy dinosaurs – the sort with zero points of articulation because it was the 90’s and kids were still capable of using their imaginations, dammit. This boy spent his languid preschool afternoons guiding his motley herd on epic journeys through valley-like ditches, rainforest-esque gardens, wasteland-ish gravel lots, and oceanic sloughs – occasionally by way of the Millennium Falcon. The stakes were always high for this heroic herd and dangers lurked around every shadowy corner – from monstrous plush t-rexes with mint Beanie Baby tags to vicious velociraptors that had been bloodied with a red Sharpie to swarms of oversized bugs from a dollar store bucket to the mighty and terrible cat-god-of-wrath Whyskerssa (whose tender mercies hinged on proportionate blood offerings). These adventures were the sort of masterful works of fiction that village elders recount to wide-eyed youngsters over late-night campfires – noting, of course, that any resemblance their tales may bear to characters or events from The Land Before Time is purely coincidental.

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