the kino park

Margot Robbie wears a hat to demonstrate how she's *so unique*, although I will say the costume design is actually one of the films greatest assets. * no spoilers, except for my opinion of the movie*      Negative reviews may be fun to read, though I’m not so sure they’re fun to write. Perhaps when a film has inflicted ill will upon the world, or when it acts with genuine malice, it can bring satisfaction to weaponize the pen against rotten images and in so doing reclaim a wasted experience. The angry critical voice is certainly one which generates a great deal of interest and readership, almost certainly the primary reason that one notorious review aggregate site is not called “Super Fresh Juicy Tomatoes.” However, there is another kind of bad movie, and another kind of bad review, which salvages little joy from the experience offered by the movie, and which can only really explore a film’s missed potential and with it the disappointment of its audience. It is alas that ...

even if Denzel is giving "hello fellow kids" a little here, he's remains immaculate * this is a spoiler free review (though granted I allude to the nature of the ending once or twice)*      Ever an exercise in at best redundancy and at worst, capitalistic cannibalism, the remake, allowing for the occasional exception, and with even further rarity the odd improvement, stands ever tall as a Hollywood staple. The film industry, and with certain parallels culture at large, have long been engaged in these microwave-like processes of cheap re-heatings, though in recent years the plastic shot for shot recreations, reanimations or dare I say desecrations, have set their plague upon a typically eager populace with increasing severity. While its obvious nostalgic cheapness is typically cause for corporate salivation, it ought to go without saying that this business strategy, if initially a viagra for the marketing department, comes with a pre-built expiration date. There are only s...

Emma Stone and Deirdre O'Connell spiraling into conspiracy *while this essay does not contain any overt spoilers to the film, it would likely be understood better and appreciated further after viewing* The western has always been about space. The spaces between settlements, between cultures, between familial divides. The vastness of the American west served as the perfect backdrop for valorizing the violent men of the new nation’s mythology, yet in the lens of certain filmmakers, it also served as a defaultly alienating space. As a swallowing hole of equally great beauty and suffocation. This, often as subtext, is certainly present in the films of John Ford though it becomes more overt in newer films like Meek’s Cutoff from Kelly Reichardt and now with Ari Aster’s truly modern western Eddington. The film divorces the western’s traditional devotion to the past and plants its feet firmly in the volatile soil of May 2020, a date that should cause at the very least a shudder down the s...

     one of the more dynamic images in Thunderbolts* * this review includes non-specific spoilers for the film*      Perhaps it is surprising, if tragically still not a saving grace, that the first Marvel movie in several years to actually somewhat get me, if not to the theater then at least to press play, features its characters grappling to reconcile “nothingness.” In the six plus years that have somehow elapsed since Avengers: Endgame , it has become a conventional take that the once mighty Marvel Studios has lost its way, however, as can happen, sometimes convention is accurate. Even allowing for the odd glimmer of life, the (seemingly) endless onslaught of Marvel properties of the past few years have by and large verged from outright unwatchable to merely poorly made. Diagnoses for these conditions have come from everywhere and everyone, perhaps even all at once, and while I readily admit that I held on longer than some, quitting somewhere around Moon ...