Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  The Power of the Dog 2021

  ★★★★★ Watched 01 Dec 2021 7

  "You want me, Mr. Burbank?"

  First of all, everything about this movie is extremely my shit. A psychosexual drama in a Western setting examining the corrosive, oppressive pressure of compulsory heterosexual masculinity? Yes, please. I’ve been hotly anticipating this one and I really thought it worked. Jane Campion was a good fit for the material. It’s set in Montana but filmed in New Zealand, which is an interesting substitute and contributed an otherworldly strange feeling to the setting.

  It’s definitely…

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  Navajeros 1980

  ★★★★½ Watched 12 Dec 2021

  A teen delinquent acquires a sawed-off shotgun and a girlfriend with an expensive drug habit, and that's just the start of the criminal exploits of El Jaro. So far this is the most action-packed of the quinqui films I've watched, with knife-fighting pimps, guys getting mowed down with machine guns, a fascist teen getting punched into a pond, and a massive gathering of teen gangs who are all ready to tear a barroom apart. There's plenty of sex, drugs and petty crime packed into this one. Youth gone wild!!

Recent reviews

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  The Terminator 1984

  ★★★★½ Rewatched 19 Sep 2024

  Viewed at The Heights Theater in Minneapolis

  It was so excellent to get the chance to see this in a theater! God what a cool movie. The look, the score, it's all so on point. Even though I saw the ending when I was a kid and it scared the hell out of me for years, The Terminator and T2 are just part of my DNA.

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  Kingdom of Heaven 2005

  ★★★½ Watched 11 Sep 2024

  Day 4 of cabin watches: I overlooked this one on the lobby shelves at first, because it was part of a four pack of action movies that had all the titles in the smallest font imaginable on the spine: Castaway, Last of the Mohicans, Master and Commander, and Kingdom of Heaven. If I would have found this the first night, that's probably all I would have watched tbh. And this one was actually on my watchlist!

  Lawrence of Arabia of…

Popular reviews

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  Crimes of the Future 2022

  ★★★½ Watched 03 Jun 2022 7

  My takeaway is that despite the gruesome details, this story is basically a standard noir story. It’s hard to know who to trust; characters lie and act hypocritically and in ways that are philosophically inconsistent. Viggo’s new organ-generating performance artist Saul Tenser is basically Philip Marlowe or Doc Sportello, floating through a world full of forces that he doesn’t totally comprehend, buffeted by parties who want to charm, trick and use him, unaware of the secret motivations that occasionally provoke…

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  Cruising 1980

  ★★★★★ Added 4

  The first time I saw Cruising was in the mid-90s. I’d probably read about it in a zine, which is where I learned about most of the weird shit I liked at the time. Luckily, the small video store I walked to most days had a surprisingly diverse selection, and it was no problem to bring home the grainy VHS copy and watch it in my basement lair. The film made a big impact on me. I’d never seen a…