iconogassed
Criticker Zealot - 7286 Film Ratings
Member Since: 26 Apr 2008
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| 85 81% |  |
The Devil at Your Heels (1981) - Rated 17 Nov 2020
"Opens as Ken "The Mad Canadian" Carter preps for the world record jump with a car(ter). He fails & sails into the final few with a loud, pointless crunch of metal and an inaudible crunch of bone. Pointlessness lingers, so too Carter's charm & acuity: he'd assessed the decrepit car with disarming frankness, shrugged off certain carnage in a particularly Canadian fashion. In the stunt of stunts he fails and fails to fail better. Unless you count the high entertainment. Which hurts a little."
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| 90 89% |  |
O.J.: Made in America (2016) - Rated 02 May 2022
"I'd like to single out one amazing sequence, in which F. Lee Bailey maintains the lie, effortlessly regurgitating what he well knows is total crap, while Barry Scheck, who still has major PR stock to manage, cannot bring himself to, strenuously equivocating under Edelman's admirably direct questioning. Somewhat understandably, Clark and Darden still get off too easy. Less understandably: no discussion on the merits of Ito's decision to allow the trial to be televised in the first place."
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| 45 21% |  |
Bird Box (2018) - Rated 14 Oct 2020
"Some reviews are much sillier than this unexceptionally silly movie. Like expecting kids raised in this environment to "act like kids" or believing that this film "stigmatizes" the mentally ill. This is the product of irrational devotion to our present psychiatry, or psychiatrists' tweets, that is no less than zealotry. Power is being willed onto dross so that we may be liberated from dross through further institutionalization, in some collective Promethean psychodrama. Now that is fucking crazy"
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| 45 21% |  |
Nobody's Fool (1986) - Rated 26 Jul 2020
"Rosanna Arquette is the manic-depressive barmaid who tries to hang herself with a bunch of balloons after stabbing her jock boyfriend in the neck with a fork 'cause he told her to get an abortion and Eric Roberts is the nomadic harmonica-playing avant-garde theater tech who loves her and Evelyn Purcell the five-time Demme AD who tries very hard to pull it all together and me the guy who is genuinely sad she did not 'cause Rosanna Arquette in the '80s is why movies exist."
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| 90 89% |  |
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) - Rated 04 Sep 2021
"The saddest movie about being funny and the funniest movie about being miserable. I loved every wittily weepy second."
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| 80 73% |  |
Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry (2016) - Rated 04 Sep 2022
"A unique film about writing, in that it's actually about farming. And I mean really about farming, and thus capital and technology; "progress" and "tradition"; freedom and family and care. The filmmakers' efforts to express something about the interrelations of these things owe much to Malick (who exec. produced), but the let's say firmness of purpose in Berry's voiceovers ensures a different effect entirely. I don't think it quite comes off like it coulda, but as a devotee I adored it."
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| 90 89% |  |
Photographic Memory (2011) - Rated 21 May 2020 |
| 80 73% |  |
Carnal Knowledge (1971) - Rated 27 Sep 2021
"Occasionally hilarious drama whose viewing can still offer provocative and uncomfortable insights into the male psyche. Like how I found out the friend I viewed it with had spent the last 20 years of his life under the assumption that Simon and Garfunkel were gay lovers."
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| 55 32% |  |
Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (2003) - Rated 01 Jun 2022
"Amateurish but effective muckraking despite the later revelation that The Move was the result not of human intervention, but Deep Blue randomizing itself out of a loop. Watching with this knowledge the programmers' refusal to divulge it every step of the way ends up adding weight to the film's account of what happens when such a contest is conceived and executed for profit and publicity rather than science and fellowship. Of course, the filmmakers' own neglect of the possibility is a fatal flaw."
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| 80 73% |  |
Chan Is Missing (1982) - Rated 19 May 2021
"Spotty acting (save the wonderful Wood Moy) does little to detract from the vivid and unique depiction of a culture, place, and time. Wang's script reportedly underwent some fairly major revisions from a more opaque structuralist treatment (he felt duty-bound not to let the first fully Chinese-American feature disappear up its own ass) but his noirish tale is still full of probing--and noncommercial--digressions on language, identity, and socioeconomic conflict. Edifying and enchanting."
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