Tag: movies

Film Collection: Saturday Night Fever

August 22nd, 2026

Directed by John Badham
Written by Norman Wexler
1977 | 118 minutes | English
DVD

John Travolta, Karen Lynn Gorney, Barry Miller, Joseph Cali, Paul Pape, Donna Pescow, Martin Shakar, Val Bisoglio, Julie Bovasso, Fran Drescher, Monti Rock III

What it’s about: Tony’s (Travolta) life is going nowhere: his Brooklyn-Italian Catholic family is broke, repressed and unsupportive; his friends are immature, racist, sexist hoodlums; his job at the paint store doesn’t exactly mean much to him. The only place where Tony truly feels alive is the dancefloor of the local disco where he and his buddies party every night. When he bumps into Stephanie (Gorney), an equally good dancer with a mind to lift herself out of their working-class neighborhood. he may have finally met someone he can connect with on a real level, awakening a drive within himself he didn’t know was there. If he can manage to not screw it up.

Reflections: Notoriously based on a New York Magazine article that the author later admitted was complete fantasy, this is a movie that altered the course of pop culture and it’s hard not to think of it in those terms. But it contrasts the otherworldly glitter of its iconic dance sequences with a heavy, uncomfortable coming-of-age story. Travolta is at the peak of his charisma here and he sells an unlikable character as a protagonist genuinely trying to rise above the toxicity that’s all he knows. And it’s the dedication to his art that overcomes his prejudices and opens that possibility for him, which comes across earnestly felt.

And that art is the showpiece here. Where the dramatic story is ugly and perhaps a little trite, the dance scenes are magnificent: washes of color set to some of the most influential music of their era, where a dynamic camera cradles the expressive performers. They also ground the narrative: the scene of Travolta and Gorney rehearsing for the first time, trading moves and improvising, sells their chemistry in an important way, as does their restrained and intimate routine at the (inevitable) dance contest. And their infectious, democratizing energy launched a thousand discos across the country for a while.

This one is actually a first-time watch for me; I’ve had it for a while, but never gotten around to it. The thing is an artifact of its time in ways that are both fun and gross, but the pressure Tony feels to escape the miasmatic bullshit of his world is deeply relevant in 2026. It’s not the most intellectual work of art, but the heart of the film still works and it’s absolutely dripping with undeniable style.
Film Collection: Bloodsport

August 22nd, 2026

Directed by Newt Arnold
Written by Sheldon Letich and Christopher Crosby & Mel Friedman
1988 | 92 minutes | English
DVD

Jean-Claude Van Damme, Donald Gibb, Leah Ayres, Norman Burton, Forest Whitaker, Bolo Yeung, Ken Siu, Roy Chiao, Lily Leung, Phillip Chan

What it’s about: As a young, troubled kid, Frank Dux (Van Damme) was taken in and mentored by a Japanese martial arts master (Chiao), eventually becoming a surrogate son who inherited the old man’s special technique. Now that his father figure is sick, Frank takes leave from the army to honor that legacy in the Kumite, an elite, no-holds-barred fighting tournament in Hong Kong. But the sadistic current champion (Yeung), a pair of CID agents (Whitaker and Burton), and a plucky reporter (Ayres) all complicate or misunderstand Frank’s quest for identity and actualization.

Reflections: Let’s be clear, this movie is stupid. It’s based on memoirs of a real person that–unsurprisingly–have likely been wildly exaggerated. It ignores several basic questions that arise from its plot: what, exactly, is the government’s investment in Frank? How did a happy-go-lucky white guy like Jackson (Gibb) end up here? Why is Chong Li (Yeung)… like that? Forest Whitaker is trying something here, but otherwise, the acting is clearly not the priority. The music is impossible to take seriously. And its social politics are deeply questionable, even by 1980s standards.

However, with a generous eye, there is a level on which this movie is about the spirituality of physical expression. It comes alive when it sets aside the dressing of its drama and focuses on the male body and what it can do, littered with shots of stretching, twitching muscles. The fight scenes and training montages are kind of low-key; they’re shot and performed in a way that, to a layman at least, seems to be honoring the actual sport involved over filmmaking spectacle by using wide camera angles and (mostly) restrained edits. As an artistic experience, it is a vehicle for imagining the mastery of that state, the deepest possible connection with the animal, material part of who and what you are. The satisfaction of keeping that together, no matter how extreme the circumstances. And if one can be open to it, it’s surprisingly effective in eliciting a meaningful response on a visceral level, if one can ignore how badly it articulates itself.

There’s also just something profoundly silly about it: the way Frank showboats while escaping the CID guys, the ridiculous faces the fighters make, the stiffness and artificiality of the dialogue, the absolute vintage 1988 extra-mild cheese of the original songs. It isn’t–and probably shouldn’t be–a movie for everyone, but as far as big, dumb, boy movies go, this one has a certain sauce.
Film Collection: The Road

August 21st, 2026

Directed by John Hillcoat
Written by Joe Penhall
2009 | 111 minutes | English
DVD

Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Molly Marker, Michael K. Williams, Garret Dillahunt

What it’s about: Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel (which I have not yet read and can’t speak to), the film follows an unnamed father (Mortensen) and son (Smit-McPhee) surviving after an unclear apocalyptic event. With no animals and no way to grow crops, any strain of civilization has disappeared and the man struggles with not passing on the trauma and loss he’s experienced while preparing his son for a dying world of cannibals, thieves, and the constant threat of starvation.

Reflections: In the first five minutes of this film, we see a father instructing his prepubescent son on how to commit suicide, if and when it becomes the only option, which pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the movie. It’s a difficult ask for an audience, to spend nearly two hours in a world essentially devoid of any hope or light. On a literal level, the visual experience of the film is a muddy, hazy mix of grey and brown that does not shy away from muck and gore. And metaphorically, what few glimpses of warmth exist in the film’s scant characters are still tinged with despair, anger, and cynicism acted out by men who lack the tools–emotionally and materially–to stand up to the moment, even when their hearts are in the right place. It falls almost entirely on the boy to carry any kind of connection to the material, and that’s a lot of weight to put on a kid.

Smit-McPhee is up to the task though, giving a really strong child performance and letting us in to a perspective that has never experienced anything but this harshness and is aware of and frustrated by the difference between what he’s being told is important and what his father often chooses to do. Mortensen also does a lot of great work here, but the best of it is in reaction, and while the supporting cast is excellent, none of them stick around. The subtle, aching score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis also offers a little relief, staying out of the way, but lifting quiet moments up on long string tones like rays of sunshine. And the ending manages to not sell either itself or the viewer out, offering at least a crumb of possibility to cling to.

There are moments that are a little awkward and saccharine, but that is part of the film’s effectiveness, I think, part of the stiffness of the father character in particular. That effectiveness is going to be a matter of taste and mood for a lot of people; it’s slow, interior, and a profound bummer to actually sit and watch. But there is catharsis in facing darkness also, and this is tightly crafted to facilitate that.
Film Collection: The Secret of NIMH

August 21st, 2026

Directed by Don Bluth
Written by Don Bluth, John Pomeroy, Gary Goldman & Will Finn
1982 | 82 minutes | English
Fullscreen Format DVD

Elizabeth Hartman, Peter Strauss, Derek Jacobi, Dom DeLuise, John Carradine, Shannon Doherty, Wil Wheaton, Paul Shenar, Arthur Malet, Hermione Bradley, Aldo Ray

What it’s about: A (very loose) adaptation of a 1971 novel by Robert C. O’Brien, the story follows Mrs. Brisby (Hartman), a recently widowed mouse and mother of four, living in the garden of a farm. The beginning of plowing season is coming, meaning they must move, but one of her children is sick and unable to make the journey. Her quest for help takes her to a group of rats living under a nearby rosebush, escaped experiment animals from NIMH who have acquired human-level knowledge of language, culture, and science and are seeking to establish their own independent society.

Reflections: I grew up with this movie, so it’s easy to take it for granted. But looking at it decades removed from both the particular sociopolitical anxieties of the late ’60s/early ’70s that spawned the novel and the “just go with it” vibes of 1980s children’s media, it’s kind of unhinged. A real government institution, and the leading mental-health research agency in the United States, has accidentally(?) created a tribe of super-rats who are on the loose. In this version, these science rats are also weirdly courtly and have a straight-up wizard king. Death is omnipresent, existential threats continually escalate, and several characters are very down for murder. The comic relief is problematically horny. There’s a lot going on here.

The film does a bit of a disservice to the book, but it’s also presented with Don Bluth’s characteristic painterly visual sense and willingness to embrace darker themes, which are enough to make it compelling if one doesn’t think too hard about it. The obligatory signature song isn’t anything to write home about, but the child characters are given dignity, there’s only a slight nod to any kind of romantic plot and, as bluntly presented as it is here, the message about perseverance through grief and sometimes risk is a good one. Dom DeLuise is doing what he does, but Elizabeth Hartman’s vocal performance is wide-eyed and earnest. Very young Wil Wheaton and Shannon Doherty are there. I still enjoy it.

I don’t know if that means I can recommend it. Even setting aside that society has changed a great deal in 44 years, a lot of it is obnoxious and nonsensical. But it is an iconic example of the kind of darkly fantastical story that haunted my generation’s childhood, which a lot of recent films, video games, YA novels, etc., have been trying to recapture.
Film Collection: Shutter Island

August 20th, 2026

Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Laeta Kalogridis
2010 | 137 minutes | English
DVD

Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Max von Sydow, Jackie Earl Haley, Ted Levine, John Carroll Lynch, Joseph Sikora, Elias Koteas

What it’s about: Adapted from Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel, the film follows Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio), a World War II veteran and US marshal in 1954. Along with his new partner, Chuck Aule (Ruffalo), he travels to the eponymous institution for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of a patient guilty of infanticide (Mortimer). But he’s taken the case with an agenda of his own, related to the death of his wife (Williams), and the deeper he probes into the practices of the island’s eccentric head doctor (Kingsley), the more things reveal themselves to be not quite what they seem.

Reflections: This is a film that revolves around a late-game reveal, which makes it difficult to discuss without spoilers. But it also represents Scorsese at his most surreal and hallucinatory, using his considerable talent to keep the audience from ever being able to completely trust what they’re seeing. While, in some ways, it very much fits in with the director’s preoccupations with masculine identity and self-delusion–Teddy asks at one point “which one would be worse: to live as a monster or to die as a good man?”–it also represents an anomaly in his catalogue in the way it uses misdirection to build its psychological dread, rather than presenting its characters for judgement in an up front (and usually confrontational) way.

That said, on a repeat viewing, the twist is well-seeded from the start, with subtleties in the performances–particularly those of Ruffalo, Kinglsey, von Sydow, and Levine–standing out. What could’ve felt like cheap and pulpy fare in lesser hands is elevated by sharp editing from longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker and expressive use of lighting and texture from cinematographer Robert Richardson. And the whole affair is given a broader significance in its frequent nods to the hollowness of justifications for war and the nihilistic possibilities of nuclear destruction.

Even a lesser Scorsese film is sill better than a lot of what’s out there and, while it may be a little self-serious and implausible for some, it still stands above other films that deal with similar subject matter and is absolutely worth checking out for anyone who’s a fan of noir-ish mystery. It’s also interesting for the handful of moments, such as the woman that shushes Teddy when he arrives at the island, that veer closer to outright horror than its director–one of our greatest living filmmakers–has ever come.
Film Collection: The Frighteners

August 19th, 2026

Directed by Peter Jackson
Written by Fran Walsh & Peter Jackson
1996 | 110 minutes | English
VHS

Michael J. Fox, Trini Alvarado, Peter Dobson, John Astin, Jeffrey Combs, Dee Wallace Stone, Jake Busey, Chi McBride, Jim Fyfe, Troy Evans, Julianna McCarthy, R. Lee Ermey, Elizabeth Hawthorne, Ken Blackburn

What it’s about: Paranormal investigator Frank Bannister (Fox) is a con man—not because he can’t actually communicate with ghosts, but because he’s in cahoots with a motley crew of them (Astin, McBride, Fyfe) to set up hauntings that he can conveniently solve for a steep fee. But when the loutish husband (Dobson) of a plucky young doctor (Alvarado) dies mysteriously shortly after becoming one of Frank’s marks, he and the new widow stumble onto a much more sinister spiritual threat—one with ties to both the town’s murderous history and Frank’s own tragic past.

Reflections: Comedy-horror can be a very difficult line to walk and several contemporary critics—notably including Roger Ebert—found this film to be a frenetically uneven mess. It absolutely is, but that’s kind of what makes it work. Jackson throws everything at the wall here—serial killers, car chases, mummy sex, a trip to heaven, an abandoned sanitarium, an unexplained drill sergeant, a jailbreak, hemorrhoid pillows, garden gnomes—into a cartoonish extravaganza that manages to be as creepy as it is loony and barely gives the audience a minute to breathe. It’s more committed to its horror than the schlocky insanity of Bad Taste or Meet the Feebles, but it also proudly wears it’s B-movie inspirations—stuffed with canted angles and ridiculous lines like “my body is a road map of pain!”—on its sleeve, without any of the gravitas or emotionality of Heavenly Creatures or The Lord of the Rings, the movies he made on either side of it. The result is something that’s difficult to pigeonhole and winds up being kind of memorable for it.

This is aided by the performances that run the gamut from Fox’s weary, sometimes even vulnerable hero (his last live-action lead role in a film, as of writing) to… whatever the hell Jeffrey Combs is doing. Not everything works; the central romance between Fox and Alvarado doesn’t totally land, Dobson’s character is a heavy part of the first half before being unceremoniously dismissed, McCarthy’s sinister old matron and Hawthorne’s stuck-up newspaper editor are a little flat and underutilized. But there’s a kind of energetic willingness to do whatever that pervades every part of the film and the inventive visual effects and early CGI hold up far better than a lot of its contemporaries, making its flaws easier to overlook as long as one isn’t expecting serious art, thematic complexity, or intense scares and just wants to have a spooky good time.

This was one of the first R-rated movies I ever saw as a teenager—its lenticular box art stood out on the shelves of Movie Time Video—and I remember thinking at the time it was an underrated gem. Watching it now, nearly 30 years later, it has the makings of a cult classic—not exactly good, necessarily, but strange and singular enough to be worth revisiting. If you’ve never seen it, put it on at a Halloween party, watch it with friends, and enjoy soaking up some audacious nonsense where everyone was clearly having a lot of fun.
Film Collection: 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

August 18th, 2026

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Written by Jean-Luc Godard
1967 | 87 minutes | French
Criterion DVD

Marina Vlady, Roger Montsoret, Anny Duperey, Juliet Berto, Claude Miller, Jean Narboni, Joseph Gehrard, Christophe Bourseiller, Marie Bourseiller, Raoul Lévy, Jean-Pierre Laverne, Blandine Jeanson, Jean-Luc Godard

What it’s about: The film eschews any kind of traditional narrative structure and defies easy summary, but loosely follows a day in the life of Juliette (Vlady), a Parisian wife, mother, and sex worker, and the people in her orbit as they grapple with the complexities of modern life.

Reflections: At some point in this brief but slightly overwhelming mixture of comedy, drama, documentary and experimentation, the phrase “drowning in reality” is used, and it seems as close to an overarching description of this movie as is possible. Part of the thrill of Godard’s films, particularly during this period, is the sheer brazenness in ignoring any kind of rules of classical filmmaking: rather than acting out a plot, the characters—including the director himself, as a whispering narrator—speak in semi-improvised treatises, directly addressing the camera as much as each other. This is a movie very much aware, not only of its own artifice—the opening moments introduce the actress Marina Vlady before overlapping her with the character she plays—but of the general difficulty in ascribing any kind of meaning to an existence constrained by language, image, commerce and capital, media, intellectual pretension, and political concerns. It makes heavy use of quotations and intertextuality, of brand names and logos, and of the urbanized, segmented landscape of apartment blocks, shopping centers, beauty salons, and cafés that envelops its inhabitants.

What saves it from being a purely intellect-driven exercise is the force and style of its presentation. The visual image is crammed full of eye-popping colors and patterns, with impossibly beautiful people, with an intense and seemingly instinctual sense of composition (the swirling mass of bubbles in a cup of coffee in a famous shot, or a car neatly slotting itself against a background of construction). Mirrors, machinery, intertitles, magazine layouts, foliage, anonymous crowds, lingering close-ups of unreadable expressions, and a thousand other details—insignificant and insufficient on their own—stack on top of each other into a suffocating hum of information, forcing the audience to grasp for coherence as the sketches of characters struggle to differentiate and define themselves amidst the energy and noise.

In case that description didn’t make it obvious, this is a movie that’s easy to bounce off of, an unapologetically arthouse “attempt at a film” (in the director’s own words). But with a little patience, it also forces one to confront seemingly obvious assumptions: why are things defined the way they are? Does the self exist outside of its relationship to its environment? Is true intimacy even possible in a world where every experience and impulse is neatly delineated and heavily commodified? Can something like a movie represent “real life” in any kind of meaningful way? What are we all even doing here? More than half a century later, its postmodern critique feels all the more relevant in a world where we are surveilled, marketed to, separated into demographics and collections of traits and behaviors in increasingly frightening and exploitative ways. And yet, I’m struck by how little pessimism I’m left feeling at the end of it—perhaps it’s always been this way and it’s just easier to notice as time and technology march forward, but nonetheless, we persist.