I Guess I'll Write About Movies Now

If I had a nickel for every time I told my kids to "use your words," I'd have enough money to send them to college. Language is part of the secret sauce that makes us humans. It facilitates communication, understanding, commerce, the whole thing. But growing up with English as my first language, I've got a blindspot when it comes to the role language plays in creating a cultural identity and binding people together. For so much of the world, English is just the default, and it's not tied into a culture. I mean, I don't consider myself English. When I visited the UK, it felt like a foreign culture. Because it is. But words matter, and language matters. If it didn't, then colonizers throughout history wouldn't work so hard to stamp out native languages wherever they went.  Kneecap  reminds us that it's still happening. Kneecap  is that rare kind of biopic that actually stars its real-life subjects, a trio of Irish-language rappers from West Belfast w...

I was an anxious child, and the transition from summer break to the new school year always filled me with dread. Unusual, right? My parents would usually take my brother and me out for a special dinner or something fun on the night before, so as to help ease the transition. One year, it was a movie. I was ten years old, it was August of 1989, and my Dad took me—and just me—to see The Abyss . I cannot remember why it was just me and not my brother. Maybe my brother thought James Cameron was overrated, maybe he'd already seen it. I don't know. But what I do know, and what's stuck with me for 35 years, is that my Dad made me feel special, and important, and seen. I don't think for one minute that he was excited about The Abyss , or going to the movies at all. I cannot think of a time he went to see a movie "just because." But he took me. On a school night. I sat next to him, and for 140 minutes we floated together through a shared dream. I will cherish that eveni...

When I was 13, I spent months in constant gut pain, with a fever from morning until night, and also experienced some other symptoms which were, quite frankly, too gross to go into on a blog like this. It was a waking nightmare. I had no idea what was causing it, how to stop it, or even what it was called. Eventually, we discovered its name, "Crohn's Disease," and after three decades I've gotten pretty good at managing it. Mostly. When Dan O'Bannon was in his 20s, he went through a similar experience. Constant pain, nausea, and no idea that Crohn's Disease was at the root of it all. O'Bannon didn't have access to the same medical care that I did, so he was forced to deal with his pain in a different way. He wrote Alien . The original Alien , which remains at the top of my list of slashers, sci-fi, and body horror cinema all at once, was inspired by O'Bannon's own harrowing journey with Crohn's Disease (which took his life in 2009). I'd l...

As a kid, I loved playing with Star Wars  toys. And I was lucky, growing up with a big brother who also loved them as much as I did, so we effectively had twice as many starships, Storm Troopers, and the like. I have core, core memories of creating action-packed scenarios with those little hunks of plastic with my brother. We spent afternoons mashing together all three movies (this was the 80s) and the occasional Transformer or GI Joe into increasingly outlandish stories, unconstrained by intellectual property laws or insane concepts like "subtlety" or "less is more." And that's exactly the feeling I had, watching Deadpool & Wolverine . The spirit of play and possibility suffuses the movie, even if Deadpool's schtick starts to show its age in this third outing. Without going too deep into the plot (and why would you want to?), Deadpool & Wolverine  dives into the multiverse, the conceit that is driving the newest phase of the Marvel Cinematic Univers...

In May of 1996, I went to see the original Twister  on opening day, at our local mall. Did I mention it was 1996? Well, since we rolled in only 20 minutes early, the only seats available were front row center. Did I mention we were in Oklahoma? It's hard to overstate just how big of a deal Twister  was for the state, and why my friends and I happily crammed into those godawful seats, which did not recline, and craned our necks back to take in the majesty of Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt fighting Tornadius, the angry God of Tornados, or whatever that movie was about. To be honest, I don't remember much about the plot, except there was a flying cow and possibly another flying cow and Cary Elwes was a villain? But whatever, it's a classic. The details don't matter. What matters is how it makes you feel. Twister  made you feel the thundering murder wind that is a tornado, in your soul. It was visceral, and powerful, and uplifting in a terribly dangerous way. Nature jams down t...

Thanks to my Dad, I developed a taste for Saturday Night Live  at a very early age (like, four or five), and as my brother and I got older, we would routinely stay up late on Saturdays to watch it together. And in our TV market, as soon as SNL  ended, Friday the 13th: The Series  began. If you're one of the literally  hundreds of people who watched it, you already know that Ft13:TS , as it is known to fans, centered on a pair of cousins and their uncle who are cursed with the ownership of an antique shop filled with equally cursed artifacts. It's a familiar trope now, with  Needful Things  being maybe the biggest in the genre, and thanks to my memories of watching  Ft13:TS  with my brother back in the 80s, it's one which holds a special place in my heart. Oddity  takes that cursed artifact shop trope and weaponizes it, creating a chilling horror flick that mixes  Shallow Grave -era Danny Boyle with some Hitchcock and Agatha Christie to w...

Memory is miraculous. There are years and decades of our history hiding in the wrinkles of our brains, from the biggest moments to the tiniest. Our memories help us navigate our worlds, relate to each other, and connect us to who we were. It's terrifying and heartbreaking when you realize you can't rely on them anymore. But it can also be motivating. Touch  is a film about memory, about chasing those memories, and living up to the promise of the past. Set during the outbreak of COVID-19, the film introduces us to Kristófer, an elderly Icelandic restauranteur, living alone after the death of his wife. We first meet Kristófer, played as an old man by actor and Icelandic singer Egill Ólafsson, outside of a rural church. He is singing along with a choir, belting out lyrics about memory, as the filmmakers are uninterested in playing coy about the theme here. We soon find that all is not well for Kristófer. He is experiencing the early stages of an unidentified neurological ailment,...

The 1990s were a good time for the fictional FBI. For a while, it was cool and sexy to be a Feeb. Clarice Starling chased Buffalo Bob, Dale Cooper wrestled with his own Killer BOB, and through it all, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigated whatever cryptid or conspiracy happened to pop up that week. It was a weird and exciting time to be a Fed. But investigations in the real world were, if possible, weirder and messier. White nationalist militias sprang up all over, people started hoarding guns for the end of days, and things were just not nearly as wryly witty or sexually charged as the will-they-won't-they-get-abducted energy of the X-Files . As weird as the real 90s were, however, Longlegs  is logarithmically stranger. Writer/director Oz Perkins has written a (coded) love letter to the FBI of the fictional past that mixes up everything chilling and creepy and unsettling of the Clinton/Reno era, and turned out a terrifying, engrossing film that rests comfortable among the b...