I Guess I'll Write About Movies Now

Twenty-five years ago, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace premiered to sold-out audiences around the world. It had been well over a decade since he had wrapped up the original Star Wars trilogy, and rather than continue the saga he had created, this new film would be a prequel, taking audiences back in time to see how it all started. It was the highest grossing film of 1999, and, in my humble opinion, it is an embarrassment. The dialog is unnatural, at best. The performances are wooden. The digital special effects were great, for their time, but pale in comparison to today’s CGI. Then there’s the issues of midichlorians. If you know, you know. But perhaps the greatest problem with Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace , and the two additional prequel films that followed, was that they simply weren’t as amazing as we imagined them to be. The original trilogy of films featured larger than life heroes, insuperable villains, and a galaxy of possibilities. There really wasn’t a...

Horror films allow us to punish the sins of society without actually stoning anyone to death. It’s nice. Now, mainly these movies focus on those sins originating from or concerning the genitalia of young persons and what they choose to do with them, but there are horror movies that branch out into the full panoply of cultural no-nos. Thinner took on gluttony, for instance, and Se7en delved into each of the big ones. It’s rare that we turn to horror films to cast a spotlight on hubris, and I think that’s a shame. Because, if we as a society spent more time calling out hubristic nonsense through horror, we might discourage people from doing things like adding the subtitle “Chapter 1” to lackluster movies. First of all, my meager AP style training is screaming at me that it should be The Strangers: Chapter One , but that’s really the least of the worries here. Very rarely in film do you hear about a movie being produced at the same time as its sequel, or even getting the go-ahead to mak...

The Garfield Movie is fine. It won’t win any Oscars, but there’s also nothing offensively bad about it. In short, it is a faithful extension of the Garfield comic strip. This Garfield, voiced by Chris Pratt for some reason, is largely the same snarky, lasagna-snarfing, Monday-hating orange blob who has graced the newspaper funny pages since 1978. On paper, Garflied cracks wise, three panels at a time, ad infinitum, and steadfastly refuses to either learn or grow. Perhaps that’s why he resonated so strongly with Gen X kids in the 80s and 90s. Garfield, as we’ve known him for the last 46 years, isn’t really built for emotional arcs, both in terms of character and medium. There just isn’t the space, or the desire, to see Garfield get deeper. And yet, this movie manages to shoehorn an emotional arc into the story by retconning Garfield’s origin. I can’t believe that is a sentence I just wrote. In this version, Garfield, as a kitten, meets Jon on a dark and stormy night—the night Garfield...

How do you know who you are? That seems to be the question at the beating heart of I Saw the TV Glow , the sophomore effort from Jane Schoenbrun. Before I get into what will surely be a concise and focused critique of I Saw the TV Glow , let me go ahead and tell you that this movie is not for everyone. The performances of the main characters are halting, almost stunted, and there is a sense of emotional suffocation that makes the movie hard to watch. The plot meanders, it jumps into magical realism, it engages in some light body horror, it features Fred Durst and does not have a neatly delivered resolution. There’s a lot about I Saw the TV Glow that is off-putting. But there is so much more to love about it. It is beautifully shot, with suburban New Jersey standing in for a homogenized American dream world, and bold splashes of unearthly color throughout that put the dream and reality into stark contrast. The performances by the three leads are heartbreaking, and muted, and instantly ...