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Gratuitous Trailer Breakdown: The Return of WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER and the Internet Age of Cult

It’s here! Fourteen years later, we finally return to Camp Firewood (unless you count the 50 or 60 times you’ve watched Wet Hot American Summer as “returning” – which I most certainly do.) In 2001, the parody of 1980s summer-camp-sploitation movies that no one asked for (and if they did they would have asked about twelve years earlier) debuted at Sundance to four sold out crowds and zero buyers. Eventually it was released in approximately  30 cities, made approximately zero money, and was pretty much ignored to death. But that is how legends are born (isn’t it?).

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5 Best Dysfunctional Movie Dads to Honor TRAINWRECK

As the opening seconds of the trailer makes clear, Trainwreck [review here] posits the root cause of protagonist Amy’s inability to sustain a romantic relationship as her father’s own dysfunction in this regard. He begins by telling his daughters the usual line, “Girls, your mother and I are getting divorced,” but goes on to make his daughters repeat “Monogamy isn’t realistic” several times. In celebration of the questionable judgment of just such men who’ve procreated and kinda blown it, here’s my list of The Top 5 Dysfunctional Dads in movies.
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Amy Schumer and Judd Apatow Talk TRAINWRECK

*This is a reprint of our 2015 SXSW coverage.

2015 is shaping up to be the year of the great rom-com as Judd Apatow‘s Trainwreck is the third great romantic comedy or romantic comedy drama (or romantic dramedy) that I’ve seen this year – the other two being Adult Beginners and Sleeping With Other People. A portion of our SXSW review states: Read More

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Out in Theaters: TRAINWRECK

*This is a reprint of our 2015 SXSW review

Take it from the effervescently crass mouth of Amy Schumer, “The title was always Trainwreck. Trainwreck or Cum Dumpster.” Oh Amy, you are such just so…you. From talk radio appearances to gross-out Twitter posts, the Schum has crafted her image on being unapologetically, oh-so-adorably crude and in the context of Trainwreck, it’s miraculous to take in. At last night’s premiere, when an audience member inundated her with compliments, she barked, “Stop trying to fuck me.” She has swiftly become the epitome of 21st century feminism-as-middle finger; the crème de la crème of vagina jokes and reverse slut shaming that will melt the lipstick off housewives and zap the calories off your finger sandwiches with her gloriously nasty one-liners and hysterically sexual non-sequiturs. Read More

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Out in Theaters: THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

*This is a reprint of our 2015 Sundance review.

Things came in twos at this year’s Sundance Film Festival with a pair of Cobie Smulders’ features competing against one another for the Dramatic Competition prize, a set of unexpected pregnancy comedy/dramas, Tye Sheridans (who actually was showcased in three films: Last Days in the Desert, Entertainment and this film we’re in the midst of reviewing) and, most notably, a duo of 1960-70s social psychology experiment films. One of which, The Experimenter told the story of Stanley Milgram, administer of increasing electrical shocks and student of peer pressure. The feature starred Peter Sarsgaard and was met with middling reviews. Read More

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Out in Theaters: LILA & EVE

Lila & Eve has the typical makings of a Lifetime Films production: sudden, out of context tragedy, crappy justice systems, female vigilantism, and unlikely friendships forged by way of grief. Starring Viola Davis as Lila, a mother who has lost her son in a seemingly accidental drive-by shooting, Lila & Eve is a film that can’t quite grasp a perspective and stick to it. Directed by Charles Stone III, most notably known for Drumline, his latest summer release falls short of being a thriller, yet has plenty of mind-numbing, shoot-’em-up action. Read More

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Out in Theaters: ANT-MAN

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I’ve always wondered where our preoccupation with size came from. Maybe cause I’ve never been the biggest, or because I’ve always been more taken by the diminutive: as a self-entitled critic, attention to detail is my craft. Fortunately for movie-goers, so it goes for the folks at Marvel and Ant-Man director Peyton Reed. This edition’s got a new musk, and underneath that an exoskeletal husk of comedic explosion and graphic excitement that rivals its full-sized super-compatriots. With Ant-Man, the folks at Marvel forgot how to make a superhero movie as usual, and pumped out one of the best Marvel adaptations yet. Read More

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Talking with Matthew Heineman of CARTEL LAND

With unprecedented access to an evolving cartel v. vigilante situation on the US-Mexican border, director Matthew Heineman found himself on the front lines of a war that’s been brewing for decades in Cartel Lands. Told through the lens of two vigilante group leaders, Dr. José Manuel Mireles of the Mexican Autodefensas and Tim “Nailer” Foley of the US Cartel Resistance force. Both men arm themselves and work outside the confines of the state and Heineman finds himself in close quarters with these outlaws, probing their victories and defeat. His ultimate victory is in leaving the door open for his audience to assess for themselves what is right and what is wrong. Read More

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Documentary Dossier: CARTEL LAND

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Cartel Land
spends most of its runtime with the men and women on either side of the US-Mexico border, but it opens amidst the men working for the cartels, gathered under cover of darkness to cook their drugs and appeal to the camera—they are people, and people have to work. After all, if God minded their little cook op, he’d smite them down right quick. And that would be that. Their peculiar bookends – given by tertiary characters with a direct hand in “polluting the populace” – provide an extra shade of depth to a documentary at first intent on chronicling the horrors perpetrated on the Mexican people in the name of the cartels that is then mixed up – like acetone, sulfuric acid and antifreeze – with the morally gray mater of self-righteous vigilantes taking up arms to protect their gente.

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Documentary Dossier: THE LOOK OF SILENCE

*This is a reprint of our 2015 SXSW review.

In psychology class, you learn about the concept of diffusion of responsibility, a sociopathic event that explains that when more people are present or complicit in an unfavorable event, the less personally responsible that group will feel for its outcome. The public murder of Kitty Genovese – in which a woman was stabbed to death in NYC but not one neighbor alerted the police – is a tragic true-to-life example of this but no piece of fiction or nonfiction has better captured the ghastly phenomenon than Joshua Oppenheimer‘s The Look of Silence. Read More