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Cannibals Need Companionship Too In Rangy ‘BONES AND ALL’

Sympathy for The Devil 

Luca Guadagnino has made a career of sucking every last ounce of fat from the narrative bones of his projects. From his arthouse critical darling Call Me By Your Name, a sweeping pedophilic queer romance, to his celebrated – though gaudy and overwrought – remake of Suspiria, Guadagnino suckles on the teat of indulgence. This viewer has found Guadagnino’s style overtly lugubrious, feigning depth by overstaying his welcome, applying a Terrence Malick aesthetic template to otherwise intriguing conceptual pitches. This is no different in his latest adaptation, Bones and All, a cannibal love story that 100% should be my jam but wasn’t entirely. Read More

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‘SUSPIRIA’ Remake a Horrifyingly Inauspicious Chore

A pretentious bore posing as high art, Suspiria is a stuffy dance horror melodrama that manages to make a murderous coven of ballet witches boring as sin. At two-and-a-half grueling hours, the film from Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name) is the most masturbatory of remakes, one that painfully tacks a superfluous hour of runtime onto the original without any added content. By the time Suspiria finally reaches its blood-soaked conclusion, I stood at such an emotional distance, with a countenance of such bored apathy, as to not even enjoy its macabre platter of dark ritual and liberal gore.  Read More

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Out in Theaters: ‘CALL ME BY YOUR NAME’ 

Call Me By Your Name is that annual run-away critical darling that far too many are quick to call a modern “masterpiece” that has good odds to bore most general audiences to tears. Clocking in at 132 minutes, the film from Italian Luca Guadagnino is long-winded indeed, emphasizing its European cinematic roots by having its characters spend a good chunk of their screen time staring into the distance, ruminating internally, sighing deeply and smoking cigarettes. After all, what’s more European than smoking cigarettes and staring off into the great beyond?  Read More