by Billie Anderson, Staff Writer
It’s unfortunate that the most compelling part of the film, the part of the film that could have encompassed most of it (like The Lizzie McGuire Movie) was reduced to a brief 2-minute montage.
How a Viewpoint Sleight-of-Hand Yields a Wealth of New Perspective on the Destruction of a Model Family
by Hunter Bush
Ari Aster's recent sophomore feature Midsommar has been a big deal in film talk circles recently, but his previous film, last year's Hereditary, is what put him on most people's radar. A film dealing with family and grief (Aster's topics of choice) through the supernatural chicanery of a witchy cult, Hereditary is most definitely when all's said and done, a Bad Moms movie. What I posit today is that there is a way to view the events depicted in the film that makes it, somehow, an Even Worse Moms movie.
Read MoreDirected by Brett Haley (2018)
by Francis Friel, The Projectionist
I feel like I should start out by saying I like Brett Haley. I spend a lot of time, both in my writing and in person with people who put up with my endless movie rants, bemoaning the current Nice Movie Scare cinema is going through. And while it’s true that there have always been Nice Movies made for Nice People, it seems like the Hollywood landscape is scrambling right now to throw these things together and ship them into theaters as fast as possible. I guess we don’t have musicals anymore to take people’s minds off the fact that we’re literally about five seconds away from a Dr. Strangelove scenario every moment of every day (and no, Damien Chazelle doesn’t count because he’s a fucking sociopath who shouldn’t be allowed within five hundred feet of a film set - more on him later, if you can believe it). So we have these light Nice Comedies for Nice People to watch. But it’s true, Brett Haley actually stands out from the pack by pure virtue of him seeming to enjoy making films and have genuine empathy and respect for his own stories and characters. He’s not cynical in his filmmaking, something surprisingly rare for people in his position. His I’ll See You In My Dreams and The Hero, while both suffering from an almost unbearable Niceness, both had their hearts in the right place. The easiest contrast to this would be my vote for Worst Picture of 2017, Lake Bell’s I Do…Until I Don’t, another film from a director I like that nonetheless drowned in its own cuteness to the point where I couldn’t tell whether or not she was fucking with me. Never a good sign.
Read MoreDirected by Ari Aster (2018)
by Rosalie Kicks, Old Sport
Hey! Remember when the Hereditary trailer accidentally played before Peter Rabbit and a bunch of parents freaked and claimed their children were forever scarred?! Well, after viewing writer/director, Ari Aster’s feature film debut you may find yourself scarred too.
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