scumbelievable

Thanks, I Hate It: Carol

Todd Haynes will always have a place in my heart for Velvet Goldmine, his languidly erotic and bratty headfirst dive into the world of glam rock. The cockeyed insight and desperate outsider sliminess of that film is nowhere in 2015's critically beloved Carol, an adaptation of no...

Valkyrie

I'm excited to announce that after settling in at my new house and thinking long and hard about the future of my fiction work on this page, I've decided on and started planning for my new project: a free novel-length piece of fiction to be posted here chapter by chapter, available to subscribers ...

Thanks, I Hate It: Jurassic World

This movie was the Hydrox to Jurassic Park's Oreo, a dry and unsatisfying store-brand knockoff with no more relation to the original than the fact that they're both circles. It drops the its predecessor's ball in every conceivable way, trading the sense of wonder and terror that made Spi...

I moved! and other announcements

Hey gang, I've been quiet and not going to the movies much lately because my roommates, who are much more responsible and mature than I am, bought a house and as of this weekend we live there together! Things have been super crazy and stressful and I got hurt during the move (I'll be fine, I just...

Thanks, I Hate It: Darkest Hour

Were I to pick historical figures most deserving of cinematic rehabilitation, Winston Churchill wouldn't exactly have been at the top of the list. Wife beater Gary Oldman probably wouldn't have been my pick to play him either, but that's neither here nor there. What really matters is the fil...

Thanks, I Hate It: Shutter Island

I love Scorsese, but when he sucks, he really sucks. The insufferable mush-mouthed grandiosity of Silence, the phoned-in domestic lives and tough guy talk of The Departed; he's not past his peak by any means (look no further than 2013's Wolf of Wall Street if y...

Fiction!

Hey guys, so since we passed the $500 mark I've been thinking hard about the choose-your-own adventure, and I just don't think I have the steam to run it on top of my other work. I'm still very much interested in publishing original fiction on here, though, and I'll have more to say about that ve...

Thanks, I Hate It: Captain America: Civil War

Writing film crit about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is sort of like trying to scale a sheer thirty-foot wall built around a vacant lot: difficult and unrewarding. Kevin Feige's near-algorithmic house style is so visually, audibly, and thematically lukewarm as to provide no real handhold  f...

I Don't Wanna Grow Up (And Neither Can You)

You can't show women being hurt. You can't show child abuse. You can't show rape. You can't show incest. Pedophilia, self-harm, intimate partner abuse, necrophilia, violence against children; if you're going to so much as talk about any of these things you need to do so at a 5th-grade level and b...

Thanks, I Hate It: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

I don't understand what it's like to be a dung beetle. There must, you know, be some underlying structure that impels their simple neural nets to roll big balls of shit, but whatever that structure is it's so far outside my experience of existence as to be functionally indecipherable. To me, Brad...

Thanks, I Hate It: The West Wing

I'll admit that this is low-hanging fruit. Lots of people despise neoliberal jerkoff Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing for a multitude of well-articulated reasons. Still, I feel that even if I have no fresh insights to bring to the conversations, the depth of my hatred for this show still jus...

Thanks, I Hate It: Jessica Jones

Maybe the most scathing thing I can think of to say about Jessica Jones is that it proceeds from the notion that David Tennant is scary. I understand that he's supposed to be this whiny, entitled creep, but his face and demeanor are so cartoonishly ineffectual at projecting menace. You c...

Dreadnought: Leah's Body

Leah hung weightless in the dreadnought’s flooded cockpit. Diodes blinked around her in the gloom, but she hardly noticed them. Her attention were elsewhere, her thoughts burning in the dissociative chemical soup of her link to the great machine. Through its bank of synthetic eyes she watched t...

In the Flesh: Us

Rich, buttery golds, washed-out blues, dried-blood reds and sepulchral greens. Us, Jordan Peele's sophomore horror feature, is one of the most richly colorful movies I've seen in recent memory. The sound isn't slacking either. Its hair-raising soundtrack by Michael Abel, the best in horr...

In the Flesh: Climax

Gaspar Noé's films always give the impression of trying to get closer to their subjects, of pressing up against skin and hair, of gripping warm flesh with rough fingers. Climax may not carry this as far in a literal sense as Enter the Void did with its warm, almost angelic inte...

Thanks, I Hate It: Inception

"You've got to dream a little bigger, darling," says Tom Hardy's character to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's as, pinned down in a gun battle with faceless dream goons, Hardy pulls a grenade launcher out of nowhere. Aside from its folding cityscapes and the storm-wracked ruins it uses to represent the psy...

In the Flesh: Alita: Battle Angel

There's not much to Alita: Battle Angel, which can of course be fine for an action movie. There's not much to Drunken Master when you get right down to it, and that's one of the most balls-out fun and exciting movies ever made. Drunken Master, thought has clean, fast-pa...

Thanks, I Hate It: Zodiac

They're watching Zodiac on the set of Zodiac.

I don't like Jake Gyllenhaal, who looks at all times like he's reciting "acting, acting, acting" in his head as he says his lines. I also don't like David Fincher, a man with the emotional depth of an earwig. I thought perhaps ...

Dreadnought

Going to post the opening of my new giant mecha novella, Dreadnought, sometime next week! I'm so excited to share this one with you guys!

Thanks, I Hate It: The King's Speech

Tom Hooper doesn't really make movies so much as calculatedly inoffensive hagiographies of people whose family owned half the planet in recent memory. There's so much that's morally repugnant about giving a multi-million-dollar blowjob to the memory of a man who, at the time, was one of the forem...

Thanks, I Hate It: Avatar

Well, here we are at the end of this year’s Week of Loathing, and what better note to end on than a movie that shattered every box office record of note to become the highest-grossing film of all time and now, just a decade later, might as well never have come out at all for all the impact it h...

Thanks, I Hate It: Wall-E

Image caption reads: “Fat bulging over edge of ATMAT”

For about forty minutes, Wall-E is the story of a sad-cute robot roaming an endless wasteland of junk. It’s a good movie, more or less. The Dr. Seuss-esque towers of trash are whimsical and otherworldly, Wall-E’...

Thanks, I Hate It: Thor

This is low-hanging fruit. I admit it. The Marvel movies are about as worthy of thought as their own promotional lunch boxes. But, you know, sometimes you want to give the work your heart, meet the artist in the void between your own mind and their vision, experience what it’s like to live in t...

Thanks, I Hate It: Blade Runner

Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic has its high points. The intricate, grimy sets, Darryl Hannah as the repulsively, tragically vulnerable android Pris—whose hellish death scene still gives me the shivers two decades after I first saw the movie—and Rutger Hauer’s justly famous “tears in the ...

Thanks, I Hate It: Pacific Rim

There is an undeniable appeal to the old Toho Godzilla movies. Rubber monster suits, singing faeries, fat dollops of exposition about Shintoist compassion—it’s a creative palette you’re not going to find anywhere in American cinema. Toho’s monsters have personalities, motivations, ties to...

Thanks, I Hate It: The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson is the greatest horror writer of the 20th century. Barker and King come close, and their imagery surpasses hers, but they lack her depth of empathy, her subtle gift for understanding and depicting the dark machine of the human subconscious pursuing its own destruction. Mike Flanag...

Week of Loathing

Hey gang, so next week I'm going to write a new Thanks, I Hate It every single day. Those five essays, and those only, will be open to the public. I so appreciate the support you show me on here and I hope it's alright with you that for a short while I'll be opening up some of the stuff I do for ...

Thanks, I Hate It: Gladiator

Thanks, I Hate It: Gladiator

More than for any other reason, I hate this movie for killing Oliver Reed. One of the greatest actors of his generation, Reed’s career had been ruined by his alcoholism and womanizing in the 80s and 90s. At the time of Gladiator’s filming he’d bee...

Thanks, I Hate It: Man of Steel

You know, I’m seldom impressed by Zack Snyder, but I couldn’t say I hate him. 300, for all that it’s a jingoistic, morally repulsive screed about how totally heterosexual and democratic the Spartans were, is a great action movie. The opening ten or fifteen minutes of his Dawn o...