If you’re like me, every time the Razzie Awards announce their dubious nominees each year the first thing you think is “The Razzies are still a thing?” Yes, incredibly, despite their ever-diminishing relevance, they’re still around. Whereas once they were a fun and much-needed rebuttal to Hollywood excess, the Razzies in recent years have gotten lazy, obvious and a little mean-spirited. Not helping are such embarrassing snafus as announcing an entirely new category dedicated to Bruce Willis mere days before Willis’s family revealed that the actor would be retiring due to a dementia diagnosis. The Razzies rescinded and apologized for the nomination, but the damage was done, and the question remains: in an era where seemingly one-third of podcasts are dedicated to shredding bad movies (the remaining two-thirds are, of course, related to true crime), what purpose do the Razzies even serve anymore, if they ever served one in the first place? Flipping the script a bit, the Criterion Channel is “honoring” the Razzies in March, featuring a collection of movies that have been in their crosshairs since the awards show’s inception in 1980. Several of the featured films have reputations that improved over time, a few should have never been nominated in the first place, and some absolutely deserved their pillorying: we (or rather, I, it’s just me writing this) rank them from “actually great” to “literally the worst.” Continue Reading →
5 Best Movies To Watch After Blade Runner (1982)
Sorcerer
If Sorcerer’s sole highlight was Roy Scheider's descent into hallucinatory madness amidst an almost lunar rock field, it would still be a special movie. Scheider is Jackie Scanlon, an American getaway driver turned washed-up exile in the isolated Columbian village of Porvenir. He’s the last survivor of a desperate mission to transport increasingly unstable dynamite to a burning oil well. The blaze is so bad that only controlled explosions to burn off its fuel stand a chance of extinguishing it. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, including Jackie’s kibashed truck giving out a long walk from the well. Haunted by—or just plain hallucinating—the laughter of his dead co-driver, he stumbles forward. Surrounded by the surreal with nothing but a rickety crate between him and the hair-trigger death, it’s all he can do besides die. Continue Reading →
Westworld
My mother was not much of a movie fan. They just never interested her that much, but when it became obvious that I was obsessed with them by the time I reached preschool age, she did nothing to discourage me. Every once in a while she'd let me know that the feature on the The 3:30 Movie (my primary outlet for watching films in those pre-cable, pre-VCR days) was something that I had to watch. Oddly, her instincts often proved to be correct and I was exposed at a very early (perhaps inappropriately so age to such films as The Producers, Duel and the Joan Rivers-penned TV movie The Girl Most Likely To. . ., all of which would be long-standing favorites of mine. Continue Reading →
Kill List
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn't exist. Continue Reading →
Smiley Face
As far back as the propagandistic days of 1936’s Reefer Madness, the onscreen adventures of those hooked on marijuana have long been a man’s domain. This boys club of bud appreciation has provided men a cinematic space to roll a joint, puff away, and ruminate on the inner machinations of, primarily cis-hetero masculinity; girl trouble, career stagnation, societal infantilization, and the general inadequacy of one’s day-to-day existence. That puff of reefer is enough to lower the mind’s defenses and reach an emotional cavalcade that unlocks heartbreak and humor in equal measure. Thus, the “stoner comedy” was born. Continue Reading →