Reaction Shots

It’s not subtle, but Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is blunt confrontation with the pressures put on women to remain youthful, vibrant, and alluring. I want to stretch the sentence longer by appending “for the cis-het male gaze” instead of the other qualifier tha tends to get overused - “society’s pressures”. But there’s the rub that Fargeat’s keeps at; she could be making a visceral argument that it is the dominant male thrust, so to speak, that drives society and therefore, society can’t be easily untethered from masculine influence. From there, the thesis develops that women are not only objects of but also unwittingly complicit in those societal pressures. Every year, we hope that something will change and there will be less emphasis on looks and maintaining appearances, but that doesn’t seem to be happening too readily. Additionally, with women finding their agency over their own bodies placed in the hands of states that essentially want to punish women for just being women, and

My eyes rolled so hard to the back of  my head when Tim Burton announced the casting of the sequel to his seminal film Beetlejuice that they sounded like a drum roll on a marimba. Sure, Michael Keaton had sighted off on coming back because he said it was a great script and sure, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara were in, but I don’t hold much of late period Burton in very hight regard (despite the presence of Big Eyes , Sweeny Todd , and Big Fish ). I didn’t realize or know that Burton has been as dissatisfied with his output in recent years as anyone. This may explain why those smaller films feel like outliers and how, once he moved farther away from the more organic processes of movie-making, his latter work feels so arch, artificial and just trying too hard.  Admittedly, Burton was never a minimalist director, but even at his most outre, he didn’t lose a sense of connection with his characters. This is principally why, for me anyway, beginning with Sleepy Hollow, it was harder and

I have other ideas for a theme for this season, but it would be tragic not to celebrate Tobe Hooper’s masterpiece’s 50th anniversary. Seen on the big screen, it’s an unnerving textbook in how to do horror. It’s also a reminder of why movies are meant to be seen on screen. Sometimes, it’s not just that characters and plot become larger than life, but that you entere a shared dream - or in this case, nightmare - with a group of strangers. In this case, the nightmare begins in broad daylight. Hooper’s genius is establishing a Texas that a number of us know pretty well; once you get out from the big cities and into the rural areas, there’s a sense of openness in the vista to just about anything, good or evil. Hooper establishes early on that we’ll be open to the latter. Reports of grave robbers exhuming graves and stacking corpses in various stages of desiccation like totems abound on the news, an early shot is a close up of dead armadillo on its back, rotting in the sun, and indeed, the s

River Oaks Theater Marquee - Houston, TX 2022, photo by John Barrett Sis and I attended the soft re-opening of a Houston staple, The River Oaks Theater. I wrote about the closing of the doors of the venerable movie house and the local efforts to save it , and its eventual reopening (which has, thankfully happened!)  The restoration is grand. The concept of a high end food menu and the expansion of the theater into a live venue is promising.  Tuesday's soft opening night went smoother than many others I've attended (restaurants, mostly, but also book stores, and even smaller theaters). There were a couple of hiccups, but nothing that would derail the experience for me. I'm talking really minor stuff like too-high volume levels for the short film that followed Dave Upp's live set. The levels were set for an acoustic performance (which was good), likely increased for the switch to electric guitar for the last song and not brought back down when the film began.  The main pr

If there's been radio silence it's because when I travel, I tend to concentrate more on the visit and the travel than on - yes, I know - writing about film. So, August resulted in only a couple of movies. Three, but Deadpool and Wolverine I'd seen and wrote up. The other two? Well, let's take a look. There's top tier Soderbergh and like everyone else, there's middle tier. Some of his more challenging works tend to miss the mark (think Bubble or even, to some degree The Girlfriend Experience and Contagion , though the latter two are among my favorites), while some of the big crowd pleasers might be a bit thin, but I'd argue remain fun. Ocean's Eleven is a respected near-classic, but the sequels are less well-regarded. I like 'em all but I might point out here that like the Coen brothers, even the lightest of Soderbergh's work still has something worthwhile and is - as far as I can recall off the top of my head, never (or if not "never"