The Urban Pantheist

Hey, I know most of you if you're going to read my movie reviews already do, but there may be some new people. I reviewed Inception

There were a few essays about the shooting in Arizona that I wanted to keep around, to read in the future, or show my dad maybe.

The Wrath of Fools: An Open Letter to the Far Right

The Rude Pundit: "Dear Right-Wingers, You Are All Muslims Now"

And behind the cut, ( Tom Tomorrow's strip about it )

If anyone has resisted friending soylent_screen  because of the lack of an alphabetical index of movies with links to the reviews, well here it is.  If it's because you hate my taste in movies (I love giant monster movies and low-budget time travel flicks) or are mad at me because of what I said about Cilian Murphy, well I don't blame you.

Oh yes it is! And unlike last time, when I reviewed the fourth Indiana Jones movie, this is entirely different, since I reviewed the fourth Alien movie. I didn't say so in the review, but I was most excited that it was directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and included Ron Perlman, from Jeunet's "City of Lost Children" and Dominique Pinon from Jeunet's "Delicatessan." Also it was written by Joss somebody or other.

Read all about it here.

For brilliant and needlessly erudite dissections and ruminations about undeserving morsels of pop culture, you can't do better than The Current Cinema, Anthony Lane's film criticism column in The New Yorker.  (My friend g_weir  accomplishes a similar feat, but hasn't been given a New Yorker position yet.) 

Lane's column typically involves the criticism of two recent film releases, taken separately, but with what little they may have in common suggested by the column's title.  This week's is "Let's Put on a Show," covering the latest Charlie Kaufman mindbender Synecdoche New York as well as Disney's latest High School Musical sequel.   I find Lane's writing inspiring in way, but it is utterly beyond my capability to even emulate it.  His vocabulary is the cream of the East Coast Elite's--I was proud not to have to look up "synecdoche" but I had to google the word "sententious" used in the first half of the column.

Then he begins to describe HIgh School Musical, for the benefit of those "with an allergy to television."  Lane explains that the prinicpal characters are Troy and his girlfriend Gabriella, and in this next installment of the series, Gabriella is getting ready to go to college: "this means leaving Troy, a decision that even Aeneas found hard to make."  Good lord, man!  A classical reference and a genuine groaner in the same sentence?  He goes on to compare the characters in Synecdoche with those of HSM, the chief contrast being Phillip Seymour Hoffman's complete joylessness and the HSM's players ability to break into song "the way that normal folk go to the bathroom—regularly, politely, and because, if they didn’t, well, darn it, they might just burst."

I'm glad that with my soylent_screen  columns I restrict myself to sci-fi/horror/fantasy films.  When I can't figure out anything insightful to say about the movies I review, I can just describe the ridiculous things that happen in them.  I'll keep reading Lane's column for inspirtation, but I'll try not to lapse into a sententious tone with my own writing.

Cross-posted to soylent_screen 

Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butthead, reexamines American stupidity in the eerily plausible dystopia comedy Idiocracy.

The Summertime Hiatus is over, and to celebrate, I needlessly brutalized the last work of a respected sci-fi writer, simply because the film is so talky that it makes "Star Trek The Next Generation" look like a Buster Keaton movie. It's The Man From Earth, where a 14,000 year old Cro-Magnon man and a room full of his college professor colleagues talk for ninety minutes, but it's not as interesting as that synopsis makes it sound. Call it The Big Chill meets Highlander, or My Dinner With EEGAH! but don't say I didn't warn you.

I'm sure you've all seen it already, but I just watched a kid's movie called Mirrormask, and wrote a review about it at soylent_screen.

Just in case you missed it last week, Soylent Screen has a new home on livejournal. Check it out at soylent_screen, if you haven't already.  This time I say some stuff about improbable Oscar winner Gladiator,  and The King of Kong, a documentary that improbably exists.  If you like reading this kind of stuff, friend that other journal.  I've also added a link to the userinfo so that you can friend the Soylent Screen Netflix account, and get annoying comments about movies sent to your email ("Boy, that sucked like a combination of Fight Club and Speed!") and see what rating I gave your favorite movie (probably 3 1/2 stars).

Hey, just because the BBT site is down for repairs doesn't mean I'm going to let my deadline slip.  In order to keep posting my movie reviews in a timely fashion, I up and created a soylent_screen livejournal.  Please feel free to friend my new film critic sock puppet.  I'll be posting my next review soon--tonight or tomorrow morning--but in the meanwhile I've stocked the archives with classic Soylent Screen.  It's all low budget, foreign, indie, and unknown horror, fantasy, and sci-fi; none of my ranting about piece of crap Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale movies.  Not yet, anyway.  Once the BBT site comes back, I'll go back to posting there, but at least for the meanwhile, this is even more convenient for lj users who want to read my crappy and sometimes funny reviews.

Two reviews in a row where I actually liked the movie!




Read my review of The Descent at Blood Blade and Thruster.