I don't expect much from this movie, but I have to admit that The Young Messiah is a pretty badass title. Granted, a badass title for a movie about a space cult or something, but a badass title nonetheless.

Zombie was intense. She also wrote a really interesting essay on serial-killer lit for the NYRB around the same time (here's a link, but it's unfortunately behind a paywall).

Sew good. But the "great man" parts of Sartor 2 seemed patchy.

I agree that S1 had a simple story at its core, but there was plenty of stuff to confuse alert viewers. Why did Matthew McConaughey have to infiltrate that drug gang, anyway? And why did Woody Harrelson's girls make the rapey doll circle? Remind me, what did that Bible institute have to do with any of it? I seem to…

Best essay: "Big Red Son." Best fiction: "Good Old Neon." IMO.

In the original text, that Blood Meridian review reads: "Dont even ask." It's a style joke, re Cormac McCarthy's distaste for standard punctuation.

I liked how the party was filmed as a blurred-out POV. Given all the orgy hype, its druggy softness (no details, even, of the knifing!) was pretty remarkable. The CEO of Tits must be pissed.

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Malkovich, Malkovich, etc. Needs more Cohens, IMO, not less!

I enjoy reading about Vollmann more than just about any other writer. In interviews, he seems both insane and brilliant, so I've bought several of his books. But I can't stand like his wordy, windy, under-edited prose style and haven't felt compelled to finish any book of his I've started.

I don't know. TV isn't the Internet. I thought Pulse (the 2001 original) was a pretty good horror movie with a similar theme as Videodrome (i.e., technological dissociation).

I'd most like to see remakes of the Cronenberg movies that seem most flawed. The Brood, Dead Ringers, and Videodrome are all stone-cold classics that really work. They're scary, well-acted, dramatic…and don't need remakes. The ones I'd like to see remade are the ones that have some good iconography (cf. the exploding…

Daniel Day-Lewis did have one actual comedy earlier in his career: Stars and Bars (1988). Like most people, I haven't seen it, although a quick Google reveals it's available in its entirety on YouTube.

I love the calm, cerebral commentary tracks he's put on some of his movies. In the Criterion release of Videodrome, my favorite part of Cronenberg's commentary was this part in a sequence where Max Renn, his arm already rotten and fused to a prosthetic gun, is shooting a guy at an eyeglasses convention (whereupon the…

Mike mentioned that Schrader used Bresson's ending a few times (I know American Gigolo and Light Sleeper; can someone help me with the 3rd?), but I thought I'd add that Schrader's Bresson appreciation went far enough that he also wrote a good book on it.

I agree, but why do you think? I mean, there's the obvious problem of basic division of labor in a capitalist society (ah-ha-hem!), which would make it harder to distill common twenty-something American experiences in a film, but, having watched Boyhood this weekend, I also noticed myself having less interest and…

Clover seemed to like the worst movies the best, simply because they laid out the themes she was interested in more clearly than films with any shred of nuance. I'd put Massacre 2 on my long list of "horror films to watch," on her rec, but this discussion is making me wonder if it's one I can safely skip.

@wetbuttsdrivemenuts:disqus Capturing the Friedmans, a documentary, sounds a lot like the found-footage-family-drama you've described. The Friedman family just happened to film everything, as the conceit of the found footage genre requires, and when a documentarian decided to edit together the record of the father and…

I know it's just a typo, but I like to imagine They Grey as a strange film in which Liam Neeson finds a magical pair of sunglasses that reveal he's being constantly chased by wolves.

Shh, I'm not sure this is a fight worth having. I agree, FWIW, but whenever I try to argue that the Hostel movies function as social commentary in the vein of Dawn/Day of the Dead, the big barrier is that the people who are most gung-ho to criticize Roth's movies also refuse to watch them.