Things (1989)

“He must have been hit by spontaneous combustion, I’ve read about that shit…” A long time ago, I remember being over at a friend’s house, and they were working on a low-budget horror short, and played it for me on a VCR. Watching Things (1989) feels like that experience but taken to a transcendent level. […]

Funny Pages (2022)

Growing up in 1980s and 1990s pop culture, one myth was the idea that if you were a geek or a nerd, or if you had niche interests about arts, movies, comic-books, that made you more special and creative than the mainstream. I can’t point to any one text, but just the idea that if […]

Born In Flames (1983)

File this under “Why didn’t I watch this earlier?” and “This is as great as they say…” Maybe I thought that a film about activism would be a bit like homework. Directed by Lizzie Borden, Born In Flames (1983) captures a moment of time – 1980s New York, in the No Wave era – but […]

Matt And Mara (2024)

Mumblecore gets a bad rap. I assume it’s the name, which most of the filmmakers lumped into that sub-genre didn’t care for. And don’t get me wrong, some of those movies are annoying and bad. Friends and I who got into those films were mainly responding to Andrew Bujalski’s first two films. Cassavetes was an […]

Losing Ground (1982)

When we first see philosophy professor Sara (Seret Scott), she is lecturing to a classroom behind a lectern, glasses on and hair tied into a bun, discussing Jean-Paul Satre. This opening scene of Losing Ground (1982) might indicate that this will be a heady, intellectual film, but it’s really about peeling back the layers underneath […]